Converting SD DV PAL (25fps) to 1920x1080 (24fps)

We produced a documentary around 15 years ago, shot PAL DV 25 fps. We now need to upscale it to HD in order to replace all the movie clips with newly transfered 24fps HD footage. I figured making the entire documentary 24fps would result in the best looking film clip replacement, as there will be no change. But the PAL DV footage itself dowsn't look so great upscaled in FCP7. Any suggestions as to how to get the best out of this? It's for a Blu-ray release.

the upscale will never look as good as the HD,
but FCP would be the worst place to do it.

Best would be to take you footage to a post house and have them do it via hardware converters.
another hardware option is to re-capture the DV via a Kona card and let it do the up-scale,
it's supposed to be pretty good.

if you have to do it yourself without hardware you could try Resolve,
and there's always Compressor, with all the settings set to "best"

i imagine you plan to slow the 25fps footage down to 24fps so there's no ugly frame-rate conversion?

are you gong to de-intelace it?
if so I'm pretty sure that has to happen before the upscale,
but a post house using some fancy hardware could do it all in one pass, perhaps

best DIY option is Nattres G-Smart de-interlace. Very good.


nick

Hi Nick,

I followed a guide I found here. I've also set the frame rate in the video section to 24 fps. The result is a lot better than what FCP7 gave me.

Sadly there's no way of recapturing any of the material as it was shot and captured 12 years ago. Luckily I still have it on an old archive drive. Another problem is that fact that the documentary includes mixed quality footage - some is from Super 8, some from VHS etc. It's a bit of a heachache to be honest!

hi there.


if you wanted to go the hardware route,
you could play your DV sub-master out to tape.


with compressor, i'd do a few tests.

frame rate:
are you converting from 25fps to 24fps?
or "Conforming"

the latter will make the footage play a little slower, but it would most likely look better.
i'd definitely test a few clips.


de-inerlacing.
if you're doing this, test before and after the blow-up.


cheers,
nick

Quote
Nick Meyers
frame rate:
are you converting from 25fps to 24fps?
or "Conforming"

the latter will make the footage play a little slower, but it would most likely look better.
i'd definitely test a few clips.

Nick alludes to the problem with simple converting discussed many times in this forum. It discards every 25th frame of the original, so playback has a little jump in the action every second. The visibility of the jump depends on what action is portrayed.

I recently had to change 50fps footage to 48fps and thought the simple conversion method might work because the jumps in the action would be half as great -- 1/48 sec instead of 1/24 sec -- although there are twice as many of them. No such luck. The jumpiness in the 48fps playback was still visible and disturbing in some shots. I also tried randomizing the frame removals. Still some disturbing jumpiness.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany