nearest-neighbor video interpolation?

alice wrote on 4/30/2025, 1:27 AM

specs/details: Vegas Pro 22, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 (4 GB), Windows 10

i have a video (source video: 4k resolution) in a project (project: 1080p resolution) consisting of screen capture recordings. things like file browsers or apps. however, i noticed when i scale this up with Track Motion, it comes out incredibly blurry. the below image is a screenshot of my 1080p rendered output. remember, the source video is in 4k, but i'm just zooming in so much on a specific element on the screen, so it comes out looking like this, which makes sense.

HOWEVER, what i WANT to be able to do is change the scaling interpolation. this is incredibly simple to do in IMAGE editors, like GIMP for example, where i made this mockup using the same frame. this is also a 1080p image, also using the same 4k footage as a source, however this time, i scaled it using nearest-neighbor (or as GIMP words it, "None" interpolation; other programs may also call this "point" interpolation).

as you can clearly see, the result is much sharper and crisp. is it pixelated? yes, very - in fact, each "pixel" in this image is actually 5x5 pixels large. but that is the goal. it looks infinitely better than the linear (or "bicubic", or "bilinear") interpolation that Vegas Pro uses. i want this nearest-neighbor scaling, but in Vegas Pro.

this has been asked several times online before but all responses seem to be about images. i can do images. i just showed how i could do nearest-neighbor scaling with images in GIMP. i also found a plugin for Vegas Pro that only works with images. i need to do this with video, though. sometimes responses will instead tell the user to simply upscale their footage BEFORE importing it into Vegas Pro - this seems completely situational. i have a 4k video rendering to 1080p - this is already larger than the rendered product. but on top of that, the source footage is an HOUR long, and i would need to scale the video by like 10 times its original resolution. this would dramatically increase the filesize of the source video and take drastically longer to edit.

i'm okay if the solution is to use plugins, too. i'll do anything to get this to work - 99% of my videos are screen captures like this anyways. this has been an issue for years. what do i have to do to be able to zoom in on text on my screen without it being so fuzzy?! OBS, the tool i used to record my screen, does this perfectly fine. it has many different options for interpolation when scaling. where are Vegas Pro's options?

also, sidenote: some people suggested switching the rendering settings in the project file or rendering template from "best" quality rendering to "draft" or "preview". this does absolutely nothing in my case. there are certainly differences, but they are incredibly minor and as you can see, does not actually solve any problem for me.

i've googled this with no luck. everyone either does not understand the question or is incredibly dismissive about it ("well OBVIOUSLY it's impossible to scale anything and have it not look blurry" (simply not true with the right interpolation), "just don't do that" (completely unhelpful), etc.) i'm more than happy to provide project info or logs if you need, though i doubt this would be necessary since it's a very general-case problem, not something specific to my project file. this happens all the time with any project file and many previous versions of Vegas Pro.

Comments

ac6000cw wrote on 4/30/2025, 2:50 AM

I'm not an expert on this, but AFAIK If you put 4k source footage on a 1080p timeline, it gets automatically downscaled to the timeline resolution inside the pan/crop plugin (which is there by default in any video event). If you use that plugin to perform the zoom/pan/crop operations it works on the native source video resolution, so e,g, you can crop a 1080p section out of a 4k video with a 1:1 pixel mapping.

Note you can also put FX plugins before the pan/crop plugin if you want them to operate at the source video resolution instead of the timeline resolution (if they are different).

So basically it's the pan/crop plugin that converts between the source and timeline resolutions.

alice wrote on 4/30/2025, 3:09 AM

😭😭😭 THANK YOU... you're the only person i've seen on the entire internet who has answered this question. this is the result of pan & crop zooming in on the spot, and THEN doing anything like masks or Track Motion afterwards. more or less, exactly what i wanted!

i feel like this seems so simple, but several times now, i've spent literal HOURS spent finding an answer... and never find one. this is so great. thank you so, so much.

zzzzzz9125 wrote on 4/30/2025, 3:14 AM

@alice Your question should have nothing to do with scaling interpolation. You should use Event Pan/Crop instead of Track Motion to scale it.

You need to remember one point: All operations after Pan/Crop are quantized to the project resolution.
Your footage is in 4k, while your project is in 1080p. Operations before Event Pan/Crop (media FX and event FX before Pan/Crop) allow you to retain 4k resolution. Pan/Crop will actually quantify it to the project resolution of 1080p after scaling. All operations after Event Pan/Crop (event FX after Pan/Crop, track motion and track FX) are based on 1080p.

Here's an example for you to understand better:

Generate a subtitle event in a 1080p project and change its resolution (frame size) to 8k.
Add "Picture in Picture" in its event FX. After being added, it's by default after Pan/Crop. Use it to scale it by 8 times, and you can easily notice that the lines are blurred.
Place PiP before Pan/Crop and it returns to normal.

Similar situations have occurred in all media. In any case, the solution is: use Pan/Crop to scale it, or use PiP before Pan/Crop to scale it.

i also found a plugin for Vegas Pro that only works with images

That was written by me. At least under my tests, it can scale my video files without any problem.

If you find any problems with specific media files, please submit an issue under this project: https://github.com/zzzzzz9125/Miscz