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Up-ressing XL2's 16:9


Paul Bruening

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Is there a trick that can take 960X480 and up-res it to 1920X1080 (1920X960)? Can it look even passable. Or, is it laughable?

 

 

Havent done it personally but I am pretty sure Cinematools in the FCP studio suite can do it. And it will probably look like DV blown up to the size of a 5 story office building. Depends on if crappy is the look you are aiming for!

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I've seen some video shot with Panasonic DVC30, on a 46" 1080 screen, and it looked pretty good. It didn't have that edge sharpness normal HDTV has, but it was far from laughable. The DVC30 is the Canon GL2 equivelant so the XL2 may do even better.

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I'd imagine one can only derive marginal (maybe 10-20%) improvement from up-res-ing before the effort becomes fruitless.

 

One technique I've heard of (which perhaps some of these programs try to capitalize on) is based on the principal of small, incremental, binary-friendly up-res-ings which take advantage of base-8 or base-16 sizes providing smoother, less noisy results than arbitrary size-ups.

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I'd imagine one can only derive marginal (maybe 10-20%) improvement from up-res-ing before the effort becomes fruitless.

 

One technique I've heard of (which perhaps some of these programs try to capitalize on) is based on the principal of small, incremental, binary-friendly up-res-ings which take advantage of base-8 or base-16 sizes providing smoother, less noisy results than arbitrary size-ups.

 

It's all in the algorithms. Bags of tricks involving math and the quirks of the human eye. I was fishing for a home brewed, insider package that gave better results than the off-the-shelf stuff.

 

Has anyone seen any attempts to up-res 960 wide to 4K wide?

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Algolith - Upconversion

 

They had also pluggins for AE.

 

But now from my quick glance of their site,

it seams you need to buy hardware or card... (?)

 

The points of interest:

 

# Advanced motion adaptive video de-interlacing

# Directional content adaptive scaling

# Adaptive Detail Enhancement settings dramatically increase picture quality

 

 

Regards

 

Igor

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Is there a trick that can take 960X480 and up-res it to 1920X1080 (1920X960)? Can it look even passable. Or, is it laughable?

 

There were a handful of movies at the outset of the "DV revolution" (has everyone forgotten already? :) ) that made it to theater screens, "Anniversary Party" "Tadpole" "Dancer in the Dark" "November" and on and on, all shot with much better cameras than the Xl2, and despite the work of extraordinary cinematographers, they all looked like poop on the big screen.

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There were a handful of movies at the outset of the "DV revolution" (has everyone forgotten already? :) ) that made it to theater screens, "Anniversary Party" "Tadpole" "Dancer in the Dark" "November" and on and on, all shot with much better cameras than the Xl2, and despite the work of extraordinary cinematographers, they all looked like poop on the big screen.

I can't speak for the others, but November was shot on a DVX100, which I would argue is not "a much better camera than the XL2".

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Hi-

 

Yes it would have been better to say "similar to or better than" in my previous rant.

 

But the point is the camera doesn't really matter in this case because the end product looks so horrible from a technical standpoint.

 

I think where the previously mentioned films in particular went wrong was in shooting rather conventionally with very substandard gear and a lousy format (for that purpose), where films like "Celebration" and maybe "28 days" used the limitations of the Dv image and created something rough but appropriate.

 

BUT, back to Paul's question, I did see a very cool episode of Nova on PBS a couple months ago about fractals, and if I'm remembering right, they talked about up-rezzing photographic images, or something related to that which was really interesting, and implied that what Paul is talking about may be possible in a way that runs counter to accepted ideas about squeezing blood from a turnip!

 

....

 

after a quick search, here is that Nova episode, I'll have to re-watch it again sometime this week...

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fractals/

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Is there a trick that can take 960X480 and up-res it to 1920X1080 (1920X960)? Can it look even passable. Or, is it laughable?

 

Don't know if folks know but in terms of software driven scalers, there is a big difference in different programs. Many of the 'engines' that do the work are not very good. Example DVD studio pro makes a better DVD than Compressor. There are a number of in depth comparisons on the web that show comparisons if anyone wants to see the differences in softwares.

 

Next question? Why do mass market DVDs look so good? Because they use stand alone profesional equipment that does what your home made software can't. Want really good looking video from a 960 source? Take it to a profesional facility where they have stand alone scalers that make your software look like Fisher Price. You can get near indistinguishable results with a good scaler and a talented person using it. I know I have.

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I think where the previously mentioned films in particular went wrong was in shooting rather conventionally with very substandard gear and a lousy format (for that purpose), where films like "Celebration" and maybe "28 days" used the limitations of the Dv image and created something rough but appropriate.

Dancer in the Dark didn't strike me as particularly conventional, cinematographically or otherwise. Can't say I liked it much, anyway.

 

BUT, back to Paul's question, I did see a very cool episode of Nova on PBS a couple months ago about fractals, and if I'm remembering right, they talked about up-rezzing photographic images

The professional still image up-rezzing software Genuine Fractals has been around for at least ten years. I don't know if it's actually using fractals or if that's just marketing, but the results are very nice. I've heard people using this one for up-rezzing video nowadays as well. You just export the whole thing as a sequence of still images, batch-process those with GF and import them back to your video timeline.

 

See Ken Rockwell's test of a previous version, with image samples.

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Dancer in the Dark, along with at least another Von Trier Movie (the Idiots) was shot with basically run-of-the-mill DV kit. Nothing fancy. Hardly lit in some cases - hence, crap. They even masked Dancer in the Dark from 16:9 to 2.35:1 with a hard matte, no anamorphics there.

 

Red Giant Software do a program to up-res SD video, called Instant HD. I've never tried it myself, but they probably have a demo on their site.

 

However, as should be obvious, don't expect any better results than what you see from these so-called "up-rezzing DVD players", the detail just isn't there to begin with. DVD players get away with it because the source is often very high quality (35mm film) and has been down-sampled a great deal.

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Dancer in the Dark, along with at least another Von Trier Movie (the Idiots) was shot with basically run-of-the-mill DV kit. Nothing fancy. Hardly lit in some cases - hence, crap. They even masked Dancer in the Dark from 16:9 to 2.35:1 with a hard matte, no anamorphics there.

 

Hi-

 

I guess it's kind of tangential to the topic at hand, but In the "making of" (Dancer) they were shooting the dramatic bits with bigger Sony D-30 cameras. The small camcorders were used for the dance numbers where Von Trier placed dozens (hundreds?) of them all over the set. In the theater you could easily see the difference in image quality, although overall it was, well, DV.

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What difference would it make to get the 960 wide, 4:2:2, uncompressed video out of the back and onto HDD? Could it get closer to passable then? Or is the resolution limit going to yield the same results either way?

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What difference would it make to get the 960 wide, 4:2:2, uncompressed video out of the back and onto HDD? Could it get closer to passable then? Or is the resolution limit going to yield the same results either way?

 

You can't get uncompressed out of the camera. The camera only outputs it's native format. How about a more robust camera?

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How about a more robust camera?

 

I have to make do with what I've got.

 

You can't get uncompressed out of the camera. The camera only outputs it's native format.

 

Dang. I remember speculation on the video threads that it put out better out of the back. It definitely, absolutely doesn't?

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Dang. I remember speculation on the video threads that it put out better out of the back. It definitely, absolutely doesn't?

No, it doesn't, but once we came close - sorta.

 

A while back, there was this guy who was re-engineering folks Panasonic DVX100's to output RAW (4:4:4), and there was even a place on the site where he was going to turn his attention next to the XL2. But it never happened. It never happened, because he sold the company (Reel | Stream Andromeda), and nobody knows to whom (a condition of sale?).

 

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume it was bought by Panasonic, or Sony, or Canon, or RED, not just for the technology, but to keep the prices nicely up in the stratosphere for their high-end offerings. Pity.

 

The site is still up and running, but only the Forums are relatively current.

 

This is the site:

http://www.reel-stream.com/andromeda.php

Here are some pretty good motion samples:

http://www.reel-stream.com/gallery_thumbs....p;start_point=0

Edited by Jack Barker
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