Instant HD
 

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/instanthd.html

i read about this today in a magazine, and thought others on here might want to know about it.

Upscale old SD footage to v.high resolutions (i.e. HD) with pretty impressive results. and for £50 or $99, that's pretty impressive.
Oh and it's a one-two click operation plug-in for PPro and Final Cut.

It'll not only benefit people with SD cameras or 2nd-camera SD cameras, but also old projects that you'd like to revive and give a boost of HD-ness to.

Not to make you feel left out, but this software has been discussed here many times.

I have an alternate called Resizer that also includes an excellent de-interlacing plug-in. Its cost is slightly higher, but other reviewers felt it gave a bit better output quality.

Keep in mind, it won't make your SD look like HD, it will allow it to hold its own when being scaled up. It works really well when you have a camera that can shoot native widescreen and true progressive like the Canon XL2.

-gb-

This has come up before and it's worth noting that you can't create detail where none exists in the source footage. So while you can convert SD content to an HD video stream it's still going to look like SD content, just spread out across more pixels. Some TV networks do a capable job of upsampling SD to HD, but they start with high quality SD source and run it through very expensive equipment to get acceptable results. Bottom line: save your money and just use your editing software to uprez SD footage if you really need to do that.

haha, funnily enough i thought i'd read about it elsewhere...must've been here then!

cheers

With all due respect Kevin, I have to disagree with that. These dedicated plug-ins have a lot more to their algorithms than the basic upscaling found in the average NLE. Being software based, they take awhile unlike the high end hardware upscalers used by broadcasters.

But I agree, it starts with good quality source material and it simply makes an acceptable larger SD image in an HD frame. You're paying for the intelligent interpolation and it takes time, but the results are worth it. I see this daily on the local news where the one station doing HD still has Beta SX cameras in the field with 16:9 turned on.

-gb-

That's a fair point so long as people understand such software isn't going to magically convert SD footage to HD quality.