scale to frame

[charles lim yi yong]

Right now my workflow to make the footage run smooth on my cs6 premiere. I scale to frame, however I noticed the qulaity of the footage has dropped.
What should I do?

 

[Uli Plank]

Do you have a Mercury Engine capable video card? The scaling is far superior over software when you're doing your final render.

Don't judge from the quick scaling in the display windows.

Another option is DaVinci Resolve, it's scaling is one of the best in the industry.

 

[Michael Jarvis]

Please correct me if I am mistaken. I take the online training at Lynda dot com. I believe when you use the "scale to frame" function of 4K footage in a 1080P timeline it actually extracts 1080P of data from the 4K file. So...when you zoom into frame so you can pan and add zooms....its actually doing it with only 1080P of information from the 4K file....making it looks really bad. You need to drop the 4K file directly into the timeline and do not scale to frame. Manually zoom in with the motion control. That will use the full 4K file. Then, of coarse, when you render out user "render at max depth." Should be fine.

 

[CK Olsen]

Scale to frame does exactly that-it takes the source footage and scales to the timeline settings. 4K scaled to frame in a 2K timeline downrezzes to 2K... 2K scaled to frame in a 4K timeline up rezzes to 4K... 3K dropped into a 720P timeline and scaled to frame downrezzes to 720P.

While footage that has scaled to frame may look lower quality in the playback window, it is not usually an indication of the final render quality, just a graphics playback issue when dynamic scaling is occurring on the fly.

And while going down in scale works fantastic, uprezzing 2K to 4K still can produce good results, depending on the footage.

BUT...

As Michael Jarvis points out, the downside of using the scale to frame feature is that (at least from my experience) you cannot zoom or pan with the motion control settings, so this can be limiting to your editorial choices. However, if this is an issue, simply UNDO the scale to frame on that shot, and you are good to go. The fact that you are nondestructive al the way through the edit pipe is what makes Premiere so solid a platform.

 

[charles lim yi yong]

i messed around with premiere cs6 and it seems to run alot faster and smoother with higher quality footage when I set the seq to clip settings.
looks like better for me to down scale at the end of the pipeline.
My system is pretty muched souped up

2 quadros
1 red rocket
8 drive raid


Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro4,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.93 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per processor): 8 MB
Memory: 32 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 6.4 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MP41.0081.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.39f5
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f5
Serial Number (system): YM91905Y20H
Serial Number (processor tray): J591401DJ1LUC
Hardware UUID: 316AA82D-EF66-5268-A10E-B1D56E8998BA

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

Ahhh, scale to frame. After working with red footage in premiere for over 2 years, this has become a very common part of my workflow. If my final output is 1080P I always use a 1080P RED timeline and have scale to frame on as default in the properties. If I need to re frame a shot I un-check scale to frame for that clip (right click) and then set the scale and the position properties. Upon rendering you have two options. You can render quickly and not check use Maximum render quality which gives great results at 1080p, or you can check use Maximum render quality which will then take each clip from it's original 4K or 5K file, debayer at 5k and then down-sample to 1080P. This can take 4 or 5 times as long and quite frankly, the output quality is virtually the same.

 

[Wes Howell]

I have found that using Scale to frame size offers slightly better playback performance when working with 4k / 5k footage in a 1080 timeline, for example.

However, I prefer to set my scale manually (in motion settings) as this gives me more flexibility for panning / cropping and motion workflows.
Copying and pasting scale value by copying and pasting motion settings to like media usually is quick and painless. (you get in the habit of what scale value to use for 3k, 4k, 5k, etc)

FWIW - I typically move to the 1080p timeline later in the editing process and keep my assets in a larger (4k, 5k, etc) as long as I can. I don't use scale to frame size.