Time Line Setting for 4k + HD + Archival footage

[Guest]

We are currently beginning post on a doc in PP. This is our first time working with Adobe Premier. The majority of our footage is 16x9 4K Red One MX footage. We will be working with SD archival footage as well as a bit of 5d mk II 1080p footage. What settings do you recommend for our time line to accommodate the various sized footage?? We are trying to keep the rendering to a minimum and to keep the timeline looking its best. Scale up or down?? 2k timeline?

All suggestions welcome!

Best,
Travis

 

[Brad Allen]

What resolution is your final export going to be?

 

[Guest]

What resolution is your final export going to be?

most likely it will be 1920x1080, but we were hoping to keep it as high res as possible through the post process so ultimately we could export it at a higher res when the projection and delivery catch up to 4k.

thanks for the response

 

[Alexander Mejia]

I would work in the highest resolution that you plan on exporting. When it comes time to making down-resed versions for different broadcast formats you will export your high resolution version into a supported uncompressed, or nearly uncompressed file format like Pro-Res, DNxHD, Cineform, or Uncompressed.

That master file that is rendered, baked down then gets cross encoded. Keep in mind that a professional will get you better results for stuff like MPEG-2 DVD than just exporting it straight out of Adobe Premiere.

Always try to use the high quality export to force premiere to do the high quality bi-cubic scaling as it makes a big difference on sharpness.

 

[Guest]

so you are saying rock a 4k 16x9 timeline and just scale all the lower res footage up to 4k?

 

[Alexander Mejia]

so you are saying rock a 4k 16x9 timeline and just scale all the lower res footage up to 4k?

Yes. If you're unhappy with the upscaling you get, contact a professional to do a higher quality upscale. You can fake more resolution by edge sharpening, adding film grain, and some other techniques.

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

Yes. If you're unhappy with the upscaling you get, contact a professional to do a higher quality upscale. You can fake more resolution by edge sharpening, adding film grain, and some other techniques.

Are you talking about hardware or software upscaling?

 

[Alexander Mejia]

Are you talking about hardware or software upscaling?

I do all of my upscaling conversions in software, since I can create a custom script for each shot. My system is fast enough for upscaling individual shots, but I would assume a hardware device could only upscale to 1080P, maybe 2K if it's really expensive. You will still need to make the jump if your final timeline delivery is larger than those resolutions.

I haven't seen fantastic hardware only results that combine denoise, unsharp mask, film grain addition, and all the things you would want to do to your footage to get the highest quality upscale to match Red footage.