Alternate workflows on Premiere

[Paul R Johnson]

I have one particular job that means I always shoot in SD (to take advantage of features on an older camera for a particular circumstance) but deliver the product, which often includes HD diagrams - as a 720p mp4 (using a 264 preset). This gives what appears to be the best quality image.

What I do is use a 720p 25 HD sequence preset, then scale the SD clips to fit, and scale down the larger diagrams - then use media encoder to generate the mp4.

My question is - is there a better way. The images lose quality if I edit in SD then generate the 720 from that for fairly obvious reasons - but would any of the other sequence presets be more suitable for what I'm doing. I've tried a few of the more obvious ones, but seem to come back to those in the HD folder. I'm not unhappy with the results, but just interested in if I'm missing something?

[Bart Walczak]

In my opinion the only thing you are missing is shooting in 720p to begin with. If that's out of the question, then you might try to upscale your SD video with some kind of hardware like AJA or BlackMagic boards, but the result will always be inferior to first getting the material in HD.

[Paul R Johnson]

No sorry - I didn't explain well. The quality level I am getting is perfectly acceptable - but the method I've become used to was arrived at by accident. I was wondering if an Premiere users have found presets that work even better. To give you a guide, I used to do the project as a DV preset, then discovered the graphic elements were better on the HD 720 preset - and there was also a small gain in picture 'quality' by using the H264 preset over others in media encoder. SD is fine for the video element.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Originally Posted by Paul R Johnson

What I do is use a 720p 25 HD sequence preset, then scale the SD clips to fit, and scale down the larger diagrams - then use media encoder to generate the mp4.

My question is - is there a better way. The images lose quality if I edit in SD then generate the 720 from that for fairly obvious reasons - but would any of the other sequence presets be more suitable for what I'm doing. ... I'm not unhappy with the results, but just interested in if I'm missing something?

No, you're not missing anything. Bu you could try taking the video into Photoshop. Photoshop CS6 can edit video too, but that's another story.

Here's a quick test. Take one frame of an SD footage with the most detail (needing the greatest resolution) and then:
1. Uprez in Premiere like you're doing right now and save that frame as a TIFF file
2. Take the SD frame into Photoshop and use the bicubic uprezzing tool. You could try three variations:
a. Uprez SD to 1080 and then downrez to 720
b. Uprez SD to 720 directly
c. Uprez SD in 10% increments to 720 - Even though this third step might seem like a lot of work you could record this in actions so it's not a big deal.
3. Save this frame as a TIFF

Look for differences in versions 1 and 3.

Here's another thing you could do:
1. Take your edit into After Effects (no transcoding involved)
2. Sharpen your footage with tools in AE - you could do the same in Photoshop if the above method works

I believe the photoshop method with sharpening will give a noticeable quality increase - so much so that you can even try that on your 720 footage and your entire project. Hope this helps.