Best Way to Scale Up Video (without buying another plugin)

One more post of my cribsheet from DV Rebel's Guide. So Stu Maschwitz recommends using Photoshop to scale up video. In his case, he's talking about using video shot letterbox 4:3 to a native 16:9 for DVD, but seems like it could work for standard-def that needs to go to high-def too. After Effects uses bilinear interploation, but Photoshop CS has a better algorithm for scaling images--bicubic sharper. So how do you use Photoshop to work with video? Stu recommends converting your movie to series of TIFF images (with LZW compression) and then using Photoshop actions to automate the process. This assumes that you have progressive video--if you have interlaced footage then you'd have to deinterlace with After Effects (use preserve edges), output 60 fps of TIFF's, scale in PS, the re-interlace in After Effects.

Rebel Color Corrector

I was just writing about motion effects tips that I got from Stu Maschwitz and his book "The DV Rebel's Guide." Well Stu also has an interesting approach to using color correction using After Effects. He doesn't like the look achievable with FCP's 3-way color corrector and has authored a plugin Colorista, which I've blogged about before here. That post includes a link to a movie that demonstrates why Colorista is a superior product.

Well you can achieve the same results of Colorista with a free plugin for After Effects called Rebel CC that Stu is giving away at his website for "DV Rebel's Guide. There's also a good tutorial video on using Rebel CC on his website, but to master it I think you would need to read the book. The interface for Rebel CC is not intuitive, which is why it is free and Colorista is $199.

There's also a competing product to Colorista called The Grading Sweet which LAFCPUG did a tutorial on.

Motion FX's in After Effects

I generally hate using slow motion in FCP because I don't like the results of FCP's frame bleding. Frame blending basically just makes up new frames by blending frames together--sort of like little dissolves. This especially doesn't look good with interlaced footage which is what I mostly work with because you have to add on the look of deinterlacing, which basically leaves you with half of your picture because it throws out every other line of video.

There's a better way of doing slo-mo called interpolation. Compressor actually will do interpolation, and it is why Compressor does good conversion from PAL to NTSC (if at shockingly slow speeds.) But Compressor is not set up to do interpolation for slo-motion. There are some workarounds, but if you have After Effects 7, then I think it is a better workflow.

With After Effects 7, Adobe introduced a new setting to frameblending called "Pixel Motion", which is interpolation. With interpolation, the software looks for what areas of the image are moving and figures out what the in-between steps would be based on how fast and in what direction those moving parts are moving. It's more processor-intensive but the results are superior to the frame blending.

So how do you turn on interpolation in After Effects? There has always been frame blending switch in After Effects, but now it has three settings--off, draft, and fine. Draft is regular-old frame blending like FCP does, and fine is interpolation. Make sure to turn on frame blending in your rendering settings or otherwise AE won't do anything when you render.

With interlaced footage, also check you footage interpretation. According to Stu Maschwitz in his book "The DV Rebel's Guide", use the Preserve Edges option for footage interpretation to insure that "jaggies will be reduced." I don't know what that means by I defintiely trust Stu 100%. This post is basically a note about what I just read in "The DV Rebel's Guide." The book is for aspiring action-film makers, but it is chocked full of awesome advice on getting the maximum out of Adobe After Effects. This info came from a chapter on creating slo-mo effects. He says shoot your movie in 24p but your slo-mo shots in 60i (interlaced), which is sort of like overcranking a film camera. Stu has a blog ProLost with a link to his book. Lots of great stuff in the book. I'm going to try and write down notes for myself here on the blog, but there's no way I could get down all the great things in the book. For any lo-budget independent who want to make a "video" for theatrical purposes, this book is a must-read.