Up Rezzing?

[Zac Fettig]

I've had good luck uprezzing footage on my MiniDV Canon XL-2 (at least, I was happy with the results). I hated throwing it on the trash bin of history, so it gets used for a variety of projects, over my 60D. I like that I can pull it out of a bag and be ready to shoot; without having to rig it up. I shoot, do pulldown removal in Cinema Tools, edit it as per normal in Final Cut, and output it using Compressor. It does add some grain, but not as much as you'd think. It has a slight advantage in that it shoots progressive, but a

 

Honestly, the glass on the front makes more of a difference. If you can do deinterlacing before editing, and can live with 4:3, it'll be an awesome camera. I think the standard lens for those things was a f1.4 Fujinon. Beautiful glass.

[Sean Cunningham]

The original Magic Bullet Suite did the best transformation from interlaced DV footage to 24P, with filtering to help smooth reduced color sampling and DV artifacting, leveraging the slight increase in temporal sampling to the spatial field. That was its original design before it became a color correction tool or, more specifically, a means for folks to just apply a pre-made LUT to their footage. This would likely provide the cleanest input to something like InstantHD or other specialized up-sampling tools.

 

That said, everything that Magic Bullet did/does in this regard is possible through the basic AfterEffects interface. That's how Stu prototyped and created the recipe for what would eventually become the product for sale. Somewhere I even have this recipe on an old exabyte backup tape.

 

Sticking with on-the-cheap, a recent suite of tools that could make the Magic Bullet like pre-processing redundant is the Windmotion package. It's a set of tools designed around a collection of freeware Windows image processing (avisynth). It started out in a similar vane as Magic Bullet, as a means to synthesize that which is no longer in 4:2:0 AVCHD footage from DSLRs, creating high quality interpolation back to 4:4:4 sampling. Since then he's added scaling techniques and shown some impressive 1080P -> 4K results.

 

http://snovidenie.com/

 

...it might be worth checking out. Some very effective 60i (and 50i) to 24P work was done before Panasonic rendered that effort as pointless with their introduction of a proper DV camera for the independent filmmaker with the DVX100, during the DV format's swan song.

[Sean Cunningham]

Oh, because I saw it mentioned more than once in this thread...

 

Getting ahold of an old 1.33x anamorphic adapter like the Century Optics, Optex and Panasonic LA7200 is going to cost you. These will run you anywhere from $1K for the Century/Optex to as high as $1500-1800 for the LA7200. They're being used and sold to DSLR shooters because they turn native 16:9 720P/1080P footage into 2.36:1 "scope". That's how I use my Century Optics and why I got it.

 

These older adapters originally designed to squeeze a 16:9 image onto a 4:3 DV frame may or may not come down some in price as we go into 2014 as both Letus and SLR Magic are introducing similar but updated products designed specifically for today's shooters, ideally working at faster stops and offering higher resolution with close focus functionality. For instance, my Century Optics can offer a passable image at f/2.8 on a 24mm lens but isn't sharp until nearly f/4 at 35mm prior to using an achromat (Tokina +0.4 doublet). The SLR Magic is sharp at f/2.8 on a 35mm and still usable at f/2 on a 35mm prior to sharpening up with an achromat. At 25mm they're stating reasonable sharpness at T0.95 with their hyper prime.

[James Steven Beverly]

The original Magic Bullet Suite did the best transformation from interlaced DV footage to 24P, with filtering to help smooth reduced color sampling and DV artifacting, leveraging the slight increase in temporal sampling to the spatial field. That was its original design before it became a color correction tool or, more specifically, a means for folks to just apply a pre-made LUT to their footage. This would likely provide the cleanest input to something like InstantHD or other specialized up-sampling tools.

 

That said, everything that Magic Bullet did/does in this regard is possible through the basic AfterEffects interface. That's how Stu prototyped and created the recipe for what would eventually become the product for sale. Somewhere I even have this recipe on an old exabyte backup tape.

 

Sticking with on-the-cheap, a recent suite of tools that could make the Magic Bullet like pre-processing redundant is the Windmotion package. It's a set of tools designed around a collection of freeware Windows image processing (avisynth). It started out in a similar vane as Magic Bullet, as a means to synthesize that which is no longer in 4:2:0 AVCHD footage from DSLRs, creating high quality interpolation back to 4:4:4 sampling. Since then he's added scaling techniques and shown some impressive 1080P -> 4K results.

 

http://snovidenie.com/

 

...it might be worth checking out. Some very effective 60i (and 50i) to 24P work was done before Panasonic rendered that effort as pointless with their introduction of a proper DV camera for the independent filmmaker with the DVX100, during the DV format's swan song.

COOL!! I'll look into these options. Thanks for the info.

 

Oh, because I saw it mentioned more than once in this thread...

 

Getting ahold of an old 1.33x anamorphic adapter like the Century Optics, Optex and Panasonic LA7200 is going to cost you. These will run you anywhere from $1K for the Century/Optex to as high as $1500-1800 for the LA7200. They're being used and sold to DSLR shooters because they turn native 16:9 720P/1080P footage into 2.36:1 "scope". That's how I use my Century Optics and why I got it.

 

These older adapters originally designed to squeeze a 16:9 image onto a 4:3 DV frame may or may not come down some in price as we go into 2014 as both Letus and SLR Magic are introducing similar but updated products designed specifically for today's shooters, ideally working at faster stops and offering higher resolution with close focus functionality. For instance, my Century Optics can offer a passable image at f/2.8 on a 24mm lens but isn't sharp until nearly f/4 at 35mm prior to using an achromat (Tokina +0.4 doublet). The SLR Magic is sharp at f/2.8 on a 35mm and still usable at f/2 on a 35mm prior to sharpening up with an achromat. At 25mm they're stating reasonable sharpness at T0.95 with their hyper prime.

Also good to know. Again, I thank you, sir. B)