Need Help: Up-Resing DV to HD

nosoapradio wrote on 4/26/2004, 8:39 AM

A short film of mine is showing in a festival here in NYC this weekend, and I'm having some difficulty converting my DV to HD.

The festival is asking for an uncompressed AVI (1280 X 720, 30P).

I shot on Super16, transferred the film to DVCAM, edited in Vegas, color-corrected, used crop tool to make it 16X9, set Vegas project properties to HD-720 30P, render to lossless AVI with Huffyuv codec.

The quality looks pretty good, but the problem that I'm having is when there is movement in the HD AVI, it looks as if the fields are blending causing a "shmooing" (pardon my technical jargon) effect. My guess is that this is caused by the conversion from Interlaced NTSC to Progressive frames (30P).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? I could even go to 24P if that would work better.

Thanks for any help you can give me,
Keith

Comments

RBartlett wrote on 4/26/2004, 8:54 AM

within your DVCAM media properties whilst on the Vegas timeline, can you confirm whether or not the field order is set or none please?

Bewarned that you maybe having playback bandwidth problems irrespective of motion. Your monitor won't show interlacing very easily anyway. So perhaps you need to explain what your "HD monitor" is being driven by?

It would seem likely that your telecine to DVCAM would be progressive.
You may need to give Vegas a hand to remove any "pulldown" frames caused by the conversion from super16.

What was the Super16 crank speed you telecined upon?

Fundamentally you need to tell Vegas as much about the source as you can. Clearly the DVCAM format will confine this spacially, however temporally, you are best to be correct in your "properties" statement on how to resolve the original SD frames.

Goodness me, 1280x720 30p will be quite some amount of data in uncompressed AVI (I guess they only want 24bpp). Do they want RGB packed pixels or YUV?

Lossless AVI in huffy will require that the festival also has this codec. If your movie is going to be a 250 gigabytes, will having it in uncompressed as half a gigabyte make it worse for you? Unless you just use huffy for "shipping".

I'd use 80MB/sec 720-30p MPEG-2 for shipping which would be around half the size again. Then this isn't my short film and I wouldn't be trying to make HD out of SD so readily.

B_JM wrote on 4/26/2004, 9:05 AM

should have gone to HDCAM or D5 or D-Beta instead -- to late now ..

if you want to keep it as 30p, you should properly de-interlace first and resize it before loading into vegas.

proper way would be to seperate into fields and de-interlace -- http://www.100fps.com/ has good info on this ..

next step would be to increase size -- since you prob. don't have eyon fusion or shake , you can use virtualdub instead, you should increase size in steps, not all at once. Use the resize filter, using the lanczos3 settings and increase size in 20% jumps -- you can enter say - 3 or 4 resize filters and go up in steps each time using lanczos3 each time untill you are at 1280x720 .. do the final render to huffyuv or (better i think) targa frames.

now set vegs properties to 720p, 29.97 or 30 , 1:1 pixel ratio and import your media.

or --

you could convert your media to 24p, but IMO , not really nessessary in your case. Though it would be a smaller file size -- i prefer faster frame rates for large screen IF possable.

they requested uncompressed avi - which is going to be a big file, you better make sure they have huffyuv installed if you are going to send to them in that format.
You should find out what hd server they are going to use for playback and MAYBE you could render to that format - at least in elem. streams so they can, if required, do the final muxing to thier standards. (i am thnking that they might be using a mpeg2 playback or quvis possably.

You could do the de-interlacing and resizing in vegas , which can do a very good job also (specially on de-interlacing) .. The method I am giving is for the very best image quality with limited tools ..

B_JM wrote on 4/26/2004, 9:16 AM

here is a really good example of the resizing methods as used in Vegas (bi-cubic spline and bi-linear resampling methods) compared to Lanczos.

http://opus.funstaff.ch/freeware/g2/resampling/

nosoapradio wrote on 4/26/2004, 9:48 AM

Thanks so far for the help.

I guess I should have stated that the festival will eventually encode to Windows Media 9, that's what they want the AVI for.

I've done a few tests while adjusting the "De-Interlace Method" in the properties:

"None"-Quality was good but the interlace on motion is horrible

"Blend Fields"-Quality was good, but the motion is "shmooey"

"Interpolate Fields"-Quality is poor (pixelated), but the de-interlace is great.

Is there a way I can get the image quality of the "Blend Fields" setting, with the de-interlacing quality of "Interpolate"?

Thanks Again,
Keith

PS: My transfer originally went to DigiBeta with a DVCAM chaser, unfortunately I do not have the funds to go back to the DigiBeta for an online session at this point in time.

B_JM wrote on 4/26/2004, 11:00 AM

the best method is still outside of vegas, not knocking vegas at all - as it is excellent, but blowing something up 600% will show everything...

you CAN use vegas, but I dont dont know how much time you have as the method to do it really well in vegas will take some time to pre-render ..

if you don't want to follow the guides posted above , you could just use one of the de-interlacing filters v-dub, some are a lot better than others ..

also -- keep in mind, depending on the video projector they are using, rendering to interlaced may not be such a bad thing - as many top of the line DLP video projectors do a bang up job of de-interlacing. you might want to find that out and save yourself some aggravation ..

TVCmike wrote on 4/26/2004, 11:27 AM

Yeah but you know that everything can be fixed in post... ;)

Having a solid workflow established from the beginning is the biggest factor to ensuring quality. I also agree with you on the Lanczos resize algorithm - it's generally considered the best.