Comments

Steve_Rhoden wrote on 6/10/2009, 10:11 AM
The BorisFX Continuum Units are not available as a plugin for Sony Vegas.
verticalheat wrote on 6/10/2009, 10:41 AM
Is there any other SD conversionHD app. which can be use as a stand alone program? I know about Red Giant, but agian this one is for Adobe and FC markets plus the price is high...
Laurence wrote on 6/10/2009, 11:16 AM
The regular old Vegas uprez (without any third party plugin) looks pretty darned good to my eyes.
verticalheat wrote on 6/10/2009, 12:00 PM
Laurence,

In Vegas video FX under which name I can find something similar to SD-HD UpRes ?
Tech Diver wrote on 6/10/2009, 12:38 PM
You can use Boris Continuum UpRez if you already have Boris Red because Red has an AE interface. Boris was running a $50 special for that effect so I tried it, but didn't like it so I did not purchase it.
Laurence wrote on 6/10/2009, 12:45 PM
There's no FX plugin, but Vegas rescales video whenever you output a different size than your source or project dimensions. The only control you have over this is when you select your "full resolution rendering quality" with a setting of "draft", "preview", "good" or "best". The only difference between "good" and "best" is that these use different resizing algorithms: "Best" uses bicubic scaling with integration, while "Good" uses bilinear without integration. A while back when I was shooting SD but wanting to get a taste of HD, I experimented quite a bit with different uprezzing solutions. What I found was the following:

First, that for best results, the best uprezzers needed to have progressive footage rather than interlaced. This meant that the higher quality uprezzing algorithms weren't going to do my VX2000 footage much good.

Second, I found that the higher quality algorithms were only minimally better than the bicubic resizing that Vegas did without any effort at all if you used the "best" setting when you were resizing video.

Third I found that one of the big things different about HD video vs the NTSC video I was shooting was the color space and intensity. SD NTSC looks really washed out compared to HD. Uprezzing did nothing whatsoever with this problem.

Fourth, some of the best examples of uprezzed SD I found were done with SD progressive scan PAL. PAL has 576 lines of resolution and better color space. I saw some wonderful looking uprezzed PAL, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with what I could achieve with my NTSC DV footage.

Fifth, I found that even with my best efforts, uprezzing that I could do with software looked no better or maybe even slightly worse than what an HD DVD or Bluray player would do on the fly with an SD DVD.

Sixth, I could match the high end resizers quality wise with VirtualDub, but at the end of the day, the difference was so slight that it was hardly worth going through the extra effort to achieve.

IMHO, the only reason to even worry about uprezzing is when you have a bit of SD footage that you want to use in an HD project. If you are in an NTSC area, the chances are pretty good that that footage is interlaced and at best has 240 lines of vertical resolution. This isn't going to look like HD no matter what you do. The difference between a high end uprezzer and what Vegas does on it's own is so slight that it's not even worth worrying about.

Vegas is better at resizing than other NLEs. It's not just uprezzing that Vegas is better at. It's downrezzing as well. Other NLEs need uprezzing and downrezzing plugins to get decent looking changes in size. Vegas does not.
verticalheat wrote on 6/10/2009, 12:58 PM
No deal, I don't have Boris Red and no AF at this point. I was thinking about SD-HD convertor because I have a lot of tapes and video libraries which can be used in HD projects, but only after conversion. Digital Juice is offering ResUp for 49.95. After reading info on their web site I my understanding was that this software may work with other (than AF, PP, FCP, AVID) hosts. My mistake.
Laurence wrote on 6/10/2009, 1:12 PM
You should be able to use any of your SD stuff in any Vegas HD project without conversion. Just drag it on the timeline.
verticalheat wrote on 6/10/2009, 1:14 PM
Laurence,

Thank you for your info about SD-HD conversions and Vegas. I'm in the NTSC land, so I can give a kiss of death to my SD libraries. Too bad - the price of progress can be expensive. I hope that "they" will come with technology which will take care about this problem...just thnink about all the archives of major TV studios from the last 30 years. they will have to find the way to show it in HD.
Jøran Toresen wrote on 6/10/2009, 1:25 PM
There is a low-cost program ($29.95) called "Video Enhancer" that use what they call "Video Super Resolution technique" to uprez video. I have not tested it myself, but you can download a 30 days free trial.

See:
http://www.thedeemon.com/

And:
http://www.thedeemon.com/VideoEnhancer/

Jøran Toresen
verticalheat wrote on 6/10/2009, 1:57 PM
I know Video Enhancer. It can enhance, but I'm affraid that at the end of the day Laurence is right. - It can be mission impossible - to get acceptable results from 480 NTSC footage.
Rain Mooder wrote on 6/10/2009, 3:15 PM
The video enhancer super-resolution algorithm is about the best you can get but you want to pair it with a great de-interlacer. Use mcbob (an avisynth script) to bob your footage and then feed it into video enhancer and the results will be measurably superior to any other resampling method for most types of footage. I assume your source material is sharp and low noise.