Blowing up ProRes 422 to create a CU - any way to do this without loosing resolution?

Hi,

Cutting a webisode that's in dire need of CU's, so we blew up the frame in FCP 7 and the result looses resolution.

The Director insists that she did this before without any loss in quality. Is there something i'm missing here? Is there a way to create CU's that don't loose quality?

It's ProRes 422 1920 x 1080 23.98 fps

I'm using FCP on a 4 year old MacBook Pro.

Rachel

rpearlster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> The Director insists that she did this before
> without any loss in quality.

Your director is very confused. There is ALWAYS loss when you do a blow-up. Always. Whether it's perceptible or acceptable is a different deal.


Is there something
> i'm missing here? Is there a way to create CU's
> that don't loose quality?
>
> It's ProRes 422 1920 x 1080 23.98 fps
>
> I'm using FCP on a 4 year old MacBook Pro.
>
> Rachel


www.derekmok.com

Try doing the blowup and then, if you own it, use NEAT VIDEO to remove the resulting grain and to sharpen it up a little.

If you don't have NEAT VIDEO, I suggest that you use an EDGE SHARPENER - very very slightly. I know there are other grain reduction plugins, so you probably have one somewhere.

I frequently push in a little. There is ALWAYS a loss in quality, but it can be mitigated by de-noising and a tiny bit of sharpening. Watch out not to overdo the sharpening.

Best

Harry

depends on what your final resolution is verses your shooting resolution..

if you shot with a large frame size, and only have to deliver a small one, then yes you can blow up quite a bit.

editors can now blow up and re-frame with impunity.
an editor i know working on a studio film shot with Red Epic at 5k was told by the lab to "just blow it up as much as you want"!
obviously a bit of an exaggeration, but they are going to 250% with no problems.

i've been told by my finishing people that i can blow my 1920x1080 Alexa footage to 140% before they have to start using extra noise / grain reduction,
and with noise reduction we can possibly go to 160%, but a lot depends on the shot.


what sort of blow up are you attempting?



nick

It's a new world, Nick...


- Loren

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hi, Lorren.

yeah, it's crazy!

another thing that's happening for me is more & more use of VFX to re-shape shots.
on my current project we have a few instances of needing to remove some air, or even lines.
where in the past we would have had to re-think the structure, now we can split the screen in half and offset both sides.

that's a small thing, too. i read somewhere about how on the last David Fincher film they would regularly "collage" multiple takes to create one final shot

i'm calling this "Cutting within the frame" (should i copyright that?)


cheers,
nick

If it's for web, why not cut the video in 720p? Then you can blow up some of the shots a tad.



www.strypesinpost.com

That's what I was going to say. Reduce the frame size of your sequence, so the 1080 pics are already too big for the frame. Then resize the ones that don't need to be CUs to fit the frame, and use the extra space you get by the frame being smaller to push the 1080 stuff closer.

You cannot "create CU's" from preshot footage without losing quality...period. You CAN get a better result if you use the custom settings in Red Giant Software's "Magic Bullet Instant HD 1.2" (try the DEMO first)

[www.redgiantsoftware.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

a couple of posts went missing here.

the point being made was that if your footage has more resolution that your delivery frame size,
then yes you CAN do blow-ups without losing quality.

1920x1080 footage in a 1280x720 sequence can have a 150% blow and still be at it;s "native" size,
a one-to-one pixel corelation.

if you were delivering SD, then you could conceivably do a huge blow (%267 aprox, from memory) and not be over-stretching your pixels.
(i've done that, it worked very well.)
there are probably issues with square vs non-squre pixels.
but mainly no-one wants SD anymore, anyway!


nick

> the point being made was that if your footage has more resolution that your delivery frame size,
> then yes you CAN do blow-ups without losing quality.

Let's clarify, though -- that is not a blow-up. That means your image will be smaller than 100 per cent when fit to the Sequence frame size. It just means you're viewing your clip frame size through a smaller window. Once you go past 100 per cent on the Scale tab, then it's a blow-up, and the usual loss of quality ensues.


www.derekmok.com

also exporting the blown-up clip then re-importing for use, looses some of the inflated pixel distortion. very slight sharpening of the clip, on shorter shots can also help hide the resolution change.

Bluey,

> also exporting the blown-up clip then re-importing for use, looses some of the inflated pixel distortion.

Uh, no, it doesn't. Pixels don't magically appear where there is no further video information.


www.derekmok.com

No you can't.

It is not a "blow-up" if source is larger than the comp (and the OP didn't mention that anyway). If you lay in a 1920 x 1080 clip into a 720p sequence and do nothing, that's not "blowing it up". You cannot BLOW UP the footage (scale it up) without losing quality...period. You can "scale it up" maybe 10% which is when softness & artifacts start appearing. QUALITY SUFFERS. It al depends on how much you are willing to put up with.

BTW...I sometimes take a 720p Prores master and export a 1080p Prores using QT Pro and it looks pretty darn good (a little soft but no artifacts). THAT'S A BLOW-UP

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Nick is dead right. This seems obvious. If you want to leverage a 1080 clip inside a 720p program you DO have the ability to blow it up --- in fact it imports that way! Initially, without any scaling, only 1280 X 720 pixels of that 1080 clip are going to display, cropped somehow, as "100%" -- yet it's a true 150% blowup inside the 720 world-- without any actual resizing at all-- thus no loss of 720p detail.

And as Joey indicates, you have 10% wiggle room for actual enlargement before your rendering engine begins to invent pixels-- HD offers so much more data to play with. Softening becomes more evident the larger your screen, of course. Everything looks wonderful on a iPhone, not everything looks wonderful on an 80" Sharp LED.

Is there less detail between 720 and 1080? Of course. That's a stylistic format choice many indie filmmakers are faced with. Some like that subtly softer look when 720 is mastered as 1080i- the broadcast standard HD delivery spec. 720 filming is the Super16mm format for this epoch-- instead of saving on film stock you save on storage! But any filmmaker editing at 720p who acquires needed clips at 1080 should be very happy with a safe 160% enlargement capability.

Sorry; slow week.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Advance to next/previous keyframes in a clip with Shift/Option-K !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide™ Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

I have a somewhat related question: if I have footage shot on a Sony NEX 6 (1080p, 60fps) what is the best way to resize that footage to 720p/60?

When I say 'best', I mean fastest. my projects are only ever web delivered (why the rest of the footage is 720p), but we would like to incorporate some of this larger format video, IF the resizing can be done efficiently.

Cheers to all, KL

Just edit the clip into the timeline. Your clip frame size is larger than your sequence frame size. That means the clip will only be at 67 per cent size before it fills the frame. You can blow up the image up to 100 per cent before you lose anything.


www.derekmok.com

Hello Derek,

I just wanted to check that your response was to my slightly OT question!

Let me get this straight (I am using FCP studio, latest version: I set up a new project, using (say) ProRes 422 LT, and pull in some 720p/60 (or 30) project and set the project to these parameters, then simply bring the transcoded Sony 1080p/60 footage in directly (and FCP simply displays it at the same size as the 720p footage, but in reality does nothing to it)?

Then, when I go to output (I use Compressor and/or QT), I simply select 720p/30 as the output size and that's when the downsizing of the 1080 footage happens?

And Loren wrote:

Quote
Loren
If you want to leverage a 1080 clip inside a 720p program you DO have the ability to blow it up --- in fact it imports that way! Initially, without any scaling, only 1280 X 720 pixels of that 1080 clip are going to display, cropped somehow, as "100%" -- yet it's a true 150% blowup inside the 720 world-- without any actual resizing at all-- thus no loss of 720p detail.

I would like to know more about this—any references, anyone? My questions arise because I am on the road most of the time and have been experimenting with very small cameras (hacked GH-2, Sony RX-100, Sony NEX 6, Panny LX-7) but one of the downsides is the different frame sizes (some do 720p, the others 1080p) and frame rates (especially between Europe and the US; the US-based 60/30fps cameras become 50/25 respectively).

I record second system sound always, but want to know more about all this, so I can assemble the best quality recording in the smallest packages (we always shoot two cameras, too).

The HD world is surely interesting, I must say, and the quality of video out of tiny cameras is simply amazing.

The 1080 should resize automatically to fill the screen of a 720 sequence. If you double click a 1080 clip on the 720 timeline to load it into the viewer, then click on the motion tab, you'll see that the scale is something like 66% (can't remember exactly what it resizes to). So what you see in the canvas when playing the timeline is what you will export.

If you want to reframe your 1080 shots you can resize them all the way back up to 100% scale if you like, but that's just a bonus of having the oversized footage and you don't have to.

Jude, thank you. Very helpful, and liberating, too!

Now a more general question: assuming that hard drive space is not a problem, is it better to shoot in 1080 and output at 720 to have the best quality, web delivery wise? In the stills world, it is generally accepted that downsizing to a smaller frame dimension improves the visual quality (noise is decreased and, assuming you use the correct algorithms, sharpness is enhanced).

Is this true for video, too? FCS allows a variety of output sizes; if shooting in 1080p, editing in 1080p, and outputting in 720p is feasible, my on-road life just became easier (all the small cameras these days shoot 1080p, at 60 or 30fps).

> assuming that hard drive space is not a problem, is it better to shoot in 1080 and output at 720 to have the best quality,
> web delivery wise?

No, it's best to shoot and finish at the largest frame size possible. Most video websites can display at 1920x1080 now. Using 1920x1080 media and finishing at 1280x720 means you're throwing away the extra resolution. It may look better than shooting at 1280x720 and finishing at 1280x720, but it's not better than shooting and finishing at 1920x1080.

If you edit and finish at 1920x1080, you retain all the options -- you can downsize to 1280x720, or compress web movies at the full 1920x1080.

Shrinking an image doesn't gain you actual image resolution; it merely gives the illusion. Like watching an HD clip on a tiny camera LCD screen. Everything's tighter on a small screen, so it seems sharper than it is. It'd be like saying a postage stamp is sharper than a billboard.


www.derekmok.com

Two things, Derek:

Can YouTube display 1080 footage?; I was not aware of that.

I understand your suggestion of editing and finishing at 1080 though (effectively future-proofing any of the work, too) and then the resizing for specific uses; thank you.

One more question: does one need special HDDs for this larger HD variant? I use FW800 drives as storage for my 720p footage; and I have never really considered working in 1080p.

TIA, kl

There's not a terrible difference in requirements between 720 and 1080. You probably won't notice much between then two in your day to day workflows. Your current drives should work fine. I do resize to 720 for stuff that has to go to YouTube, but Vimeo does 1080, so it's better to go with 1080 for them if you can.

> One more question: does one need special HDDs for this larger HD variant?

Yes. Just a single FireWire 800 drive will likely choke up if you have more than one HD stream (ie. more than one clip overlapped). You will need at least a RAID0 setup. The requirements also increase if you're dealing with 59.94fps instead of 23.98fps.


www.derekmok.com

Really Derek? I work with tons of 1080 these days off all sorts of drives and hardly ever get problems. What format are you talking?

> I work with tons of 1080 these days off all sorts of drives and hardly ever get problems. What format are you talking?

It depends on what kind of drive as well, and the frame rate. I had one FW800 drive that was already having problems with two streams of 1920x1080 ProRes 422 at 23.98fps. Then again, it was a cheapo drive bought by the client, so I suspect it may not have even been 7200rpm.

It's a no-brainer for me these days, though -- I always work off at least RAID0. I don't need short-term redundancy, but I certainly need the speed.


www.derekmok.com

Well I never doubt your word, D. I haven't had any trouble myself though, so maybe best if you do tests on your own gear, Kit, and see how it runs.