more forward thinking crazy upscaling ideas....

wwjd wrote on 12/4/2014, 2:36 PM

so, a while back I proved to myself that upscaling 1080 to 4K in vegas created the extra pixels in between that had more gradients of color - call me crazy but that is what I saw on my screen...

and I understand the practice of downscaling 4K to 1080, you an fill in the chroma blanks going from 4:2:0 to 4:4:4

and SEEING a difference when I change Vegas project properties from 8-bit to 32-bit video full range....

.... is there a way I can upconvert my 4K video from 8-bit to 10-bit.... even maybe by upscaling it bigger - to let scaling fill in the color blanks - then rendering to a 10-bit codec or file type?

Bottom line: which render codecs can handle 10-bit output files?

Also, I may get a Shogun that allows me to record full 10-bit from the camera... what would I render to, to NOT lose any bits?

Comments

Cliff Etzel wrote on 12/4/2014, 5:42 PM

I've been playing around in Premiere Pro CS6 with Red Giant's Instant 4K plugin. According to Adobe's spin doctors, PPro internally converts right to 32 float mode - so given that it's optimized for nVidia cards, I'd speculate you could turn around and save as a Cineform file for editing - but I'm only speculating as my tests brought my machine to a crawl - even with some test R3D footage.

I will say that up rezzing to 2K footage of my 1080p DSLR clips looked pretty good to my eye - but anything past that my machine really starts to bog down.

YMMV

musicvid10 wrote on 12/4/2014, 10:12 PM

This is full range 8 bit source rendered to 10 bit YUV and opened in a float project.

The first observation should be that it is not "filling in the color blanks," as you would want to think.
The second and third should be that 10 bit intermediate does not cure banding in 8 bit source, and that more colors are not added to the source palette, as some internet blogs would want us to believe.

tanstaafl (google it).

wwjd wrote on 12/4/2014, 10:24 PM

k, so which codecs handle 10-bit in vegas once I start using real 10-bit files?

musicvid10 wrote on 12/4/2014, 10:28 PM

Sony YUV, DNxHD, Helix, Cineforem, a few others that can be downloaded.

videoITguy wrote on 12/5/2014, 1:09 AM

Review again WWJD

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=900137

AND THIS THREAD:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=886761

OldSmoke wrote on 12/5/2014, 7:43 AM

I personally like XAVC Intra from Sony. It's 422 and has almost no losses either when compared to Sony YUV 10bit. But as mentioned already, there is no "magic" of filling in colors happening either. What isn't there to begin with wont be there after.

wwjd wrote on 12/5/2014, 8:32 AM

even if I am pixel peeping and SEE extra pixels of varying colors making up what was lesser pixels, after upscale? Vegas is doing SOMETHING more than simply doubling pixels and keeping the exact same color for the nearest added. Otherwise upscaled would just look like "doubled", you know what I mean?

musicvid10 wrote on 12/5/2014, 9:00 AM

This has been covered many times before and doesn't beg reexamination.
Vegas uses bicubic interpolation for scaling, which is mathematically better than pixel "doubling" (linear scaling).

That said, bicubic is rather low on the food chain for scalers, having been around since the earliest days of Photoshop.
The added bits have only the effect of "adding air" to the encode, with the result of losing shadow detail and adding noise during subsequent operations.

Lanczos is much better for upscaling, but it's still no good for making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, if you catch my drift. The blogs are only 1% right.

Let your hardware do the upscaling, and let go of the notion of getting a free lunch.
;?)

NickHope wrote on 12/5/2014, 10:14 AM

I'll echo that and say that I've generally been pretty disappointed with fancy upscalers when taking SD to HD. None of them achieve much that bicubic can't.

By which I'm talking Lanczos3, Lanczos4, Spline36, Spline64, Blackman and other fancy AviSynth upscaling methods. They're all underwhelming and frankly very similar in broad terms to bicubic. A bit of sharpening helps but the result is blatantly not true HD.

Whatever my Blu-ray player and TV do when they upres DVD to 1920x1080, I wish someone would put in a software program.

musicvid10 wrote on 12/5/2014, 11:45 AM

+1

BTW, I've tested magicYUV renders of a Belle Nuit, and the quality results (mainly chroma subsampling) are about the same as Sony YUV, which was the best of the 8 bit lossless codecs I tested first time around. I didn't compare render times or file sizes in that quick test.

What I do know is that MagicYUV will have to offer a free 10 bit 422 version available, otherwise it will be all but useless for encoding 4K and UHDTV.

musicvid10 wrote on 12/5/2014, 11:53 AM

"A bit of sharpening helps but the result is blatantly not true HD."
Sharpening always seems to blow pixels, so a little unsharp/convolution or median is what I use when absolutely necessary. Handbrake now has an experimental NLMeans filter, which predictably is very, very slow.

It would help these discussions a lot if the hobbyists and game enthusiasts would simply give up their belief in alchemy.

ddm wrote on 12/5/2014, 12:41 PM

>>>>>It would help these discussions a lot if the hobbyists and game enthusiasts would simply give up their belief in alchemy.

Thanks. I needed a good, hearty laugh this morning.