Upsampling SD to HD?

[KRSESQ]

Is anyone upsampling their SD digital video to HD? I'd like to experiment a bit and see what kind of results I get going from SD anamorphic widescreen to 720p.

What are the favored tools and how does the output compare to true 720p HDV?

For perspective, I'm shooting with a Canon GL1.

Kevin

[Dr Mordrid]

Not that the results will ever be great, but I'd start by transcoding the DV into a less lossy intermediate codec which should help with many of the quality loss issues in the up-conversion. I use MJPeg at a bitrate of 6-8 mbps. 10 mbps MJPeg is considered "lossless". Morgan Multimedia's is cheap ($20), fast and generates high quality.

VideoStudio 11.5 Plus and DVD MovieFactory, as well as Adobe's Premiere, can encode to HDV/720p files. All have good cropping tools for cutting out the letterbox. I don't recommend Premiere Elements as Adobe is dragging its feet regarding full AVCHD support in that product, and IMO AVCHD cams are the future.

[Hulk]

What Doc said. Due to the limited colorspace (chroma subsampling) of the DV format upsampling provides less than optimal results. The color information just isn't there.

[Dr Mordrid]

Not that it's "there" after the resampling to the intermediate codec, but in it you at least have a 4:2:2 color space for interpolation. NTSC DV especially interpolates very badly. This same intermediate codec trick is used in editing systems that use the CineForm HD codecs for HDV, but a good MJPeg is a ton cheaper.

[KRSESQ]

Thank, guys. I downloaded the trial version of Vegas Movie Studio to see what kind of job it would do, but it won't render a video from 720x480 to 720p. It throws the error message "does not support frame sizes greater than 1440 x 1080," even though the selected frame size is 1280 x 720. Naturally I cannot find any info about it on Sony's Vegas website. I thought it might be a limitation of the trial version, although Sony claims the trial version is "full-featured."

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

Kevin

[Hulk]

Not that it's "there" after the resampling to the intermediate codec, but in it you at least have a 4:2:2 color space for interpolation. NTSC DV especially interpolates very badly. This same intermediate codec trick is used in editing systems that use the CineForm HD codecs for HDV, but a good MJPeg is a ton cheaper.

I agree with you 100%, including using an HDI. Doing the interpolation using a 4:2:2 colorspace with 10 bit depth will most likely provide a better end result since all the math and editing operations will take place at that higher precision/colorspace.

And of course you are right about the "uneven" 4:1:1 colorspace of DV not being "cooperative" for upsampling to MPEG-2's 4:2:0. It's like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole!

Paul - As you know I'm a Vegas Pro 8 user and it is pretty widely accepted that Vegas does a good job interpolating. I'm not familar with Movie Studio but it should do 720p. Did you try to use a HDV template?

[Dr Mordrid]

Not sure myself about Vegas-anything, but I do know that Ulead's editors will let you include any frame size in any project profile. 99.9% of the time when doing upconverts all I do is set up a 16:9 custom profile for uncompressed avi's then export to the HD profile I require using high quality settings. As long as non-square pixel rendering is set and you use the cropping tool (if needed) the end product looks as good as it can.

[Evildead666]

I extracted the SD video to RAW 720P video, then compressed.
Made for some pretty large intermediary files, but the quality was good.
I then compressed with DivX at 7Mbps for 720p.

Not as good as 1080p scaled down to 720p though in x264...

i'm not very familiar with x264 yet...

[Brian Ellis]

IMHO, no NLE costing <$10k (arbitrary figure) is good at interpolating extra pixels.

If we take a pixel sequence AAABBBCCC and double the resolution, it will produce AAAAA(aab)(abb)BBBB(bbc)(bcc)CCCCC and not the desired AAAAAABBBBBBCCCCCC, assuming uncompressed 4:4:4 colour space. I think that interpolating systems exist, but they will be massively expensive dedicated hardware and not software, because we approach super-computer requirements.

That having been said, my TV set has built-in upscaling from SD 576i to 720p. How it is done is a mystery but, 95% of the time, it is remarkable. I've noticed that there is a delay of about half-a-second in its processing. The most prominent failure in its processing is that it is unable to process near-horizontal lines of <~3 or 4 pixels (e.g., violin strings) which remain badly "staircased" with no upscaling. Interestingly, it even seems to manage to reduce some, but not all, moiré effects from inappropriate clothing.

[Evildead666]

My panasonic dvd player upscales to 720p beautifully, even DivX which is below 576 resolution, and i can't fault it yet...

I can't get anywhere near that quality on my pc...

[Dr Mordrid]

Same on our new JVC 1080p LCD. Its Genessa upscaling chip does 16:9 DVD's spectacularly well.

[KRSESQ]

Already have the Morgan codec. Downloaded Ulead Videostudio 11 trial and tested its 720p30 upscaling. It did rather well, that is to say the output 1280x720 mpg didn't show any obvious degradation from the original DV footage. Which was really the best I could hope for.

Diagonal lines didn't show any obvious stairstepping, at least not on my computer monitor.

Just have to view it on a good HD display once to see what it really looks like.

Kevin

[Nowhere]

BTW, somehow related - also about upsampling from SD to HD, but for playback.

Is there anything on the horizon (or perhaps available?) that could do the "magic" of upsampling DVD players, but...in software, when watching video file on a PC?

[Evildead666]

FFDshow can be configured to upscale images ..
I have it set at 2x for any file smaller than either 641 or 481 pixels, and for some smaller res files, 3x works particularly well...

Its not super beautiful, but its better than nothing...there's a few settings to play with too...

edit : the upside is you can also tweak lots of video settings, like gamma etc... or turn them off.

[Nowhere]

Yeah, I'm also using ffdshow (polished version on which Combined Community Codec Pack is based)...but from the opinions people share about upsampling DVD players I got the impression that there was something more to it than resolution doubling/aWarpsharp/postprocessing of ffdshow can accomplish...