Best way to upscale DV footage to a 720p timeline?

Hi guys,

I want to use some old DV footage on a 720p timeline. What would be the best way to upscale the footage, how would I get the best possible quality? I can just make the clip bigger in FCPX but of course this gives rather bad results. Red Giant has a plug-in for FCP 7, it's called Instant HD or so. Do you know of something similar for X? I'd hate to go back to 7 for this.

Any advice is very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Seb

Instant HD wasn't great in my view. Didn't seem to do anything more than simple scaling did.

I never tried it, Tom. Just know that it exists. Good to hear that you didn't like it, then I don't need to go back

They say on their website that it adds extra pixels based on some fancy maths but maybe it's not that fancy after all?

Do you know a good way of upscaling without too much loss of quality? Thanks!

Is your DV footage interlaced or progressive? If it's progressive you can allow both fields to show at once and that will make the upscaled image look much better. Not 720p quality but certainly better than a deinterlaced image or an image showing only one of the two fields.

Compressor's frame controls allow for very good results. Takes some time but if you just a few shots it is worth it.

See some instructions here:

www.larryjordan.biz/compressor-up-res/

FWIW. I had 720p and 480p material that I let FCPX upres to 1080i and it looked very good. Good enough for a national broadcast spot for Cartoon Network.

Thanks for the input, guys. The footage I have is recorded on miniDVD (remember there was a time when consumer cameras did that??) so it's in some compressed codec. I'll check how to best get it off those DVDs following your ideas.

Have a nice day and thanks again!

Most likely it's in MPEG-2, which means it's really heavily compressed. You might think about not scaling the material up to fill the screen and using some other treatment around the material.

Use iMovie to import, it will wrap the mpeg2 nicely in QuickTime. Then import the clips into fcpx.

I was handed a stack of those for a project in the spring. Found that was the best method. For whatever reason fcpx can't see the disks, at least 10.0.8 could not.

Thanks! So far I used mpegStreamclip but will try the iMovie alternative and see what works better.

iMovie will keep the creation dates as well as all the individual clips. MPEGStreamclip I believe makes just one string out.