Barry, about S-Spline and the DVX100
 

I tried to uprez some 720x480 DVX100 Frame Grabs in S-Spline, but the program never let me uprez to either 1920x1080 1280x720. I always end up with some oddball resolution like 1620x1080 or 1080x720 How did you do it? By the way, I don’t own the camera myself, I just got the frame grabs from the net and they registered as 720x480.

You probably had "maintain aspect ratio" selected.

Keep in mind that regular DV (at 720 x 480) is a 4:3 aspect ratio. 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080 are both HD resolutions, at a native 16:9 aspect ratio.

All the frames that I resized, had been shot using the panasonic Anamorphic Adapter, so my 720 x 480 was already ready for 16:9 exporting. If you're taking regular shots, regular 4:3 shots, and up-rezzing them to HD resolution, you'll probably end up with stretched-wide-looking footage. If you want to take a regular shot and up-rez it to HD 16:9, you'll have to convert the regular shot to be 16:9 first (which can be done by cropping it in PhotoShop to 720 x 360).

Thanks Barry, that worked.

That's cool Young, the only thing is, it looks as though the images suffer from some type of "blockiness." The “blockiness” is not from S-Spline, but maybe from whatever you used to put the original frame grabs on the net, maybe? Anyway, I think S-Spline is amazing. While it can't turn a DV camera into an HD camera, it sure as heck does make a large SD image tolerable.

http://www.shortcut.nl/redirect.php?...&id=ssplinepro

Thanks.

You see the blockiness on the frame grabs because I was panning a lot when I was videotaping. I made a few grabs on Studio 7 (cheap NLE) and then uprez them using the S-Spline Pro demo.

Magic Bullet does a pretty good job of dealing with macroblocks & color artifacts - great tool to use before running s-pline.

Thanks for the tip. :)

I wanted to experiment directly with that (Magic Bullet De-Artifacting) but I couldn't get the demo to run.

A key component to success with S-Spline Pro was finding a DV codec that did chroma smoothing. Without that, if you use the raw DV data (especially in NTSC) you'll get ugly stairstep edges because of the 4:1:1 color sampling. I found that the Avid codec does smoothing, but FCP and Vegas do not. Matrox has a freely downloadable VFW codec that allows you to select whether you want smoothing or not.

Magic Bullet's de-artifactor looks the most promising way to go to get the smoothest, cleanest source before up-rezzing. If anyone has it and wants to try it, I'm sure we'd all like to see a before & after!

You guys might also want to check out this:

Smooth Kit
http://www.revisionfx.com/smok.htm

Grain Surgery (very good)
http://www.visinf.com/gs/ae/

Next time I'll use DVFilmMaker before running S-Spline Pro.