I have a project I want to do in HD but I want to include some SD clips. Can FCP upscale and crop those clips to match 1080? I understand that they will not look as good as the HD but I just want them to fill the screen at least.
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Can FCP Upscale SD to HD?
- Thread starter Dartamis
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Yeah, but I think you have to do it manually. You just drop a SD clip inside of a HD timeline, and just go to your Motion tab, and scale it up to fill the screen. It probably look really terrible though, and comparable to a TV scaling 480i to 720p/1080i/1080p. 🙁
OK so then my next question is does anyone know of a good tool to use for upscaling SD?
Carl Spackler
macrumors 6502
Regardless of what you use, you'll never get true HD resolution, or improvement in image quality if you're asking. To get HD res, shoot in HD. Otherwise, use the native resolution of SD. Besides, if you upconvert SD to HD, not only will you get a much bigger file for no reason, but you'll also lose quality in the process. Everytime you re-encode a file, you lose quality.
Have you used this software yet? I've looked at this several times, but it just seems like a better image interpolation method. Worth $100?
I know it won't look like HD. I'm not aiming for that. The bulk of the project will be shot in HD but I just have to throw in some older footage that happends to be SD. I just want it to fill the screen without it looking like a muddy mess.
Well in that case, looks like you have two options for that. Scale it up in FCP, or use InstantHD. You could probably use some filters to tweak the scaled image if it looks like crappy.