Pixelated upscaling in Vegas Pro 15

OliPar wrote on 12/18/2018, 3:42 PM

Hello fellow forum users!

I recently got my first Vegas Pro in the Humble Bundle (I have past experience with Magix Movie Edit) and I tried to edit a little bit of emulated (old) console content. The recording I have is in its native resolution (in this specific case 504x440) and I try to get it upscaled to 825x720 (to achieve the effect described below). Upscaling itself isn't that hard it seems - you just set the target resolution in the export settings.

However, when upscaled it looks quite blurry - and when talking about normal camera footage, it would make perfect sense to have the 'new' pixels blend in in an attempt to make the upscaling less noticable. However these old Games are supposed to be "blocky".

My Question is: is there a way to scale the footage up, without having it try to interpolate the "between-pixels" but to just blow the individual pixels up - to keep it pixelated?

Thank you, Oliver.

Comments

EricLNZ wrote on 12/18/2018, 4:54 PM

I don't know if this would work but you could try reducing the rendering quality such as dropping down from "Best' to "Good".

klt wrote on 12/19/2018, 3:32 AM

...or you could add pixelate effect and properly tweak it. Not exactly the same, but may be OK for you. (If not sorry for bothering...)

OliPar wrote on 12/19/2018, 3:32 AM

I don't know if this would work but you could try reducing the rendering quality such as dropping down from "Best' to "Good".


I tried it and all it really does is making export take slightly less long. Doesn't seem to have that much visual impact anyway... Certainly doesn't get my job done...

Thank you anyway :)

klt wrote on 12/19/2018, 3:53 AM

Best uses bicubic, good and below bilinear. Not a big difference in that regard ;)

 

EricLNZ wrote on 12/19/2018, 4:05 AM

Is your source progressive or interlaced and is its framerate (FPS) the same as your intended export?

OliPar wrote on 12/19/2018, 4:37 AM

Is your source progressive or interlaced and is its framerate (FPS) the same as your intended export?


Progressive, Framerate is the same.

...or you could add pixelate effect and properly tweak it. Not exactly the same, but may be OK for you. (If not sorry for bothering...)


I will try that, when I'm back home :)

klt wrote on 12/19/2018, 7:05 AM

OK, if that don't work good enough, you can still upscale using ffmpeg. There's an option to choose interpolating method, and the nearest neighbour will be yours. If you want I can dig up ffmpeg doc for that, but you could find it yourself too ;)

OliPar wrote on 12/19/2018, 11:41 AM

...or you could add pixelate effect and properly tweak it. Not exactly the same, but may be OK for you. (If not sorry for bothering...)


Well this doesn't seem to be the way to go.

OK, if that don't work good enough, you can still upscale using ffmpeg. There's an option to choose interpolating method, and the nearest neighbour will be yours. If you want I can dig up ffmpeg doc for that, but you could find it yourself too ;)


This however is very promising indeed! I just struggle to find a (preferrably lossless) high quality codec (I don't want to add unneccesary artifacts before rendering - that would sort of defeat the point), that can be encoded by ffmpeg and decoded by Vegas. I tried numerous ones, yet none of these (not even h264 with -qp 0) could be imported. FFmpegs standard mkv settings also look quite promising, yet it can't be imported either :/

Could you please point me to a fitting video codec? I'm somewhat tired of my trial and error...

I just want to add, that I'm quite disappointed in regards to VP15 at this point. Quite a few codecs aren't supported for import and (even if it is a nieche application) I cannot change the upscaling method applied... Probably it is a good editing suite and I love the real GPU rendering (unlike the other Magix) but still... First impressions and such...

Thank you all for your help!

NickHope wrote on 12/19/2018, 12:04 PM

In my opinion you're not going to be able to convert pixels of the original resolution into equivalent pixelation in the new resolution if you're only increasing the (linear) number of pixels by a factor 1.63. That's around the factor where that approach is least likely to work.

I suggest you should concentrate on achieving the highest quality upscaling you can, possibly with a little sharpening afterwards.

HappyOtterScripts gives you access to different resizers in the advanced settings of its RenderPlus script. But be prepared to see little improvement, if any, over what Vegas itself can do. Upscaling video in software is difficult and usually disappointing.

MagicYUV is my preferred lossless intermediate codec. HappyOtter will install UT Video Codec during installation, if you want, which is similar and good but doesn't generally decode quite as easily.

OliPar wrote on 12/19/2018, 3:05 PM

In my opinion you're not going to be able to convert pixels of the original resolution into equivalent pixelation in the new resolution if you're only increasing the (linear) number of pixels by a factor 1.63. That's around the factor where that approach is least likely to work.

Well, FFmpeg seems to be able to do exactly what I'm trying to achieve, it certainly is possible then - I'm just looking for a supported (and preferrably lossless) codec for importing the generated file

 

I suggest you should concentrate on achieving the highest quality upscaling you can, possibly with a little sharpening afterwards.

HappyOtterScripts gives you access to different resizers in the advanced settings of its RenderPlus script. But be prepared to see little improvement, if any, over what Vegas itself can do. Upscaling video in software is difficult and usually disappointing.

I'm not sure, if you understood what I wanted to accomplish, I don't really want to 'improve' the video - the next neighbour scaling that FFmpeg provides is exactly what I was looking for - I'm just slightly dissappointed that It seems to not be do-able in VP15 - But thank you for the link, will look into it tomorrow or when I'm back from holidays.

MagicYUV is my preferred lossless intermediate codec. HappyOtter will install UT Video Codec during installation, if you want, which is similar and good but doesn't generally decode quite as easily.

Sounds good! Let's just hope, that if HappyOtterScripts isn't able to achieve the wanted effect, FFmpeg can encode that codec :)

NickHope wrote on 12/19/2018, 11:29 PM

Nearest neighbor scaling will give you a quality loss if the factor in the increase of linear resolution is not a whole number. That quality loss would theoretically be maximized at a factor of 1.5, where the new intermediate pixels have a 50/50 choice in which neighboring pixel they match. That quality loss will still be significant at the factor of 1.63 that you're proposing. The result will have a mixture of "blocks" that are just 1 pixel or 2 pixels in length, which is too small to look "blocky" in a good way. It's more likely to look even softer than other methods, or just generally degraded. But it's worth a try and I'd be interested to see the before/after comparison.