DV Up-Resing
 

On the rare occasion when a dv/hdv/digital/sd/whatever piece of footage makes it into a main stream piece of cinema, mostly documentaries really, seems to me that say DV footage in this case is somehow uprezed from 720 x 480 to the film format, I know you can just up-rez things, but I was curious to know besides just blowing it straight up if there's a way to kind of refine the pixelization and somehow infuse it with more resolution, I heard of(never seen) software that will take a photo at low-rez and using some special algorithim enlarge it without doing pixelization, does this sort of thing exist for video? Please tell us, give us your thoughts on the matter.

You are talking abou S-Spline. On some pictures that software works very well, on others it doesn't. Anyhow, remember this: the detail isn't there on tape, so you'll never get it! Some algorithms will just make a 'smoother' uprezzed image...

There are several methods for resizing. Aside from spline, bicubic resizing is one of the better approaches for enlarging natural images.

Actually, in theory at least, a series of frames can contain information that can be used to intelligently interpolate more detail into each of the frames. I don't think I've seen it done, but it certainly could be (might take a cray to do it!). That sort of thing would almost fall into the AI category.

I'm sort of hoping to coax my Dad into taking a stab at a sort of AI approach to interpolating detail into the individual frames, by analyzing series of frames. He's a computer scientist from almost as far back as the stone age and studied AI most his life. I doubt he'll ever try to take it on though. He's retired now, in his early 70s.

Another popular application for uprezzing still photos is called Genuine Fractals. As the name implies, it uses fractal based calculations for uprezzing.

-gb-

Are there any resize filters for Vegas available that use either spline of fractals?