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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Converting SD 16mm scan to HD?

Wesley Scoggins

Wesley Scoggins

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I am working on a project that has a lot of 16mm source material that was telecined to SD, and have to conform it to some HD footage.

What is the best way to process the 16mm? I have CS4, Magic Bullet Suite, and Neat Video.

It is pretty grainy and noisy, so I am thinking of processing it through Neat Video first for grain/noise reduction, then processing it through Instant HD Advanced for the upressing, then CC it in Magic Bullet.

I know Neat Vid has a noise reducer that is well regarded around these parts, so I am definitely going to use it for the clean up, but when working with SD source material, is it generally better to process it through the denoiser BEFORE you process it through the upresser?

I am going to do some tests, I was just wondering about anyones experiences with dealing with 16mm material from an SD source, and what worked best for them.
 
I'm assuming re-scanning "properly" is totally out of the question, or you wouldn't be asking...

Why not try both, and tell us which worked better for you? Personally, I would expect the noise reduction to work best on footage that is as unprocessed as possible, but I don't have any experience with Neat Video.
 
Yea, doing a re-scan is out of the budget for the team i'm on at the moment, so I am having to make due.

And will do, like I said, I was going to do a few tests, just would like to hear anyone elses experience with a similar situation.
 
Wesley Scoggins said:
Yea, doing a re-scan is out of the budget for the guys I am working with, so I am having to make due with what i've got.

And will do, like I said, I was going to do a few tests, just would like to hear anyone elses experience with a similar situation.
Click to expand...

Why not edit with the SD transfers, then get only the shots you use re-scanned to HD and conform.?
 
Because the SD material is going to be a significant portion of the film. It's feature length, and it's over an hours worth of material, about 3/4ths of which is usable takes.

I am trying to pressure to get a rescan done, but it's unlikely, so I am trying to make the best of the SD content I can.
 
Re-Scan?

Re-Scan?

No great way to make HD out of SD footage.
I've used Cineform to up-rez some SD files.
I would up-rez first, then do any processing and CC.
Any processing you do before the up-rez de-grades the resolution.
The better source you have, the better the up-rez will be.
What format is the SD that you have?
I mean is it VHS, Beta, Hi-8, S-VHS, DV flavors, 1-inch, MII, BetaSP, D1 ,D2, DigiBeta, D5?

My guess is that it is 4x3 now and you want a 16x9 HD output.
Good luck! Just going from 4x3 to 16x9 throws away at least 15% of the few pixels you already have.

A rescan would really help in nearly all cases.
But don't expect miracles either way. If the footage looked bad in SD, it will look even worse in HD. All the flaws and missed focused shots will be magnified. A film shot just over 15 years ago will look much worse than one shot with in the last decade. Film stocks really did improve, even just in the past 15 years.
 
Yea, it's 4:3 and we're going to crop it to about 16.9. The source material is a DVD so it's MPEG2 encoded (I know, blargh).

So I am having to do deartifacting processing on top of the grain reduction processing. The issue primarily I think is the compression artifacts more than the grain, because the blocking is terrible.
 
MPEG

MPEG

Go get the source tape. My guess is that anything above VHS is going to be better from tape than a Mpeg-2 DVD source.
If they won't re-scan, the least they could do is find the source tape.

Garbage In = Garbage Out.

May be it should processed to look more like "A Scanner Darkly". I'm just saying. You can't take SD MPEG2 and make pristine HD.
What other "over-processed looks" might work for the film?
Back to "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." - Orson Welles
Could you make it artful?
 
Garbage In = Garbage Out

Garbage In = Garbage Out

donatello b said:
" The source material is a DVD so it's MPEG2 "

based on mpeg2 = get a custom OPPO 981 DVD player with SDI out ..you can find them on ebay $599 ... capture over SDI ... then uprez from there ...

http://cgi.ebay.com/Pre-modified-Op...s?hash=item48342b153b&_trksid=p4295.m20.l1116
Click to expand...

Garbage In = Garbage Out
A DVD Player is not going to invent resolution, even if it has SDI out.
If that was the case, a Wal-Mart $39 SD DVD player with a 1080p HDMI up-rezed output would look better than one with just SDI and should be as good as any Blu-ray.

I don't know what to say. My guess is the transfer was sub-par at best now.
They got what they paid for. The labs laughing all the way to the bank.
The Lab knows you'll have to go back to them and pay all over again to do it for real the next time. Or else, you don't really have a film. Do you? The current transfer is going to look bad, even on YouTube, as it is.

Do you have a RED? Maybe you ask Lumiere how he used a RED to Telecine old WWII footage. See this thread: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33068

Now, if they don't have the 16mm film, I would question that maybe they don't really own this footage.
 
Data?

Data?

Okay, maybe it's not as bad as I'm thinking.
Are the DVDs Data or Video. Do the just play in a SD DVD player?
Video DVDs are limited practically to around a 6Mbps stream rate (9Mbps in theory, but few if any DVD players can sustain a 9Mbps stream at playback).

Or...

A data DVD could hold much higher bit rates. A 25Mbps stream of Mpeg2 is considered good enough for HD on some Blu-ray movies.
Can you tell us what the bit rate these files are encoded at?

Again, my guess is that this transfer was a one-light just for dailies to a video DVD at 6Mbps CBR (constant bit rate).
It was never intended to be a master.

Not that CBR is bad. CBR would be a good thing in this case.
VBR tends to raise compression artifacts some of the time. But it allows more video time to be squeezed on a DVD, with only a minor loss in quality most of the time.

This problem is a great example of why film is going away... and RED is so great.
These producers cannot even afford now to process and transfer their 16mm film properly.
Film, processing and transfers are very very expensive to the low budget filmmaker.
 
It's close to an hour and a half of footage at around 3 gigabytes. So about 5mbps.

It's CBR, and MPEG-2 encoded, after getting it I ripped it off the disk at over 10mbps to try to avoid any additional artifacting because I didn't want to introduce anything new. It was also in a 60i wrapper, so I had to deinterlace it, output it to 24p, then converted it to 16-bit tiff sequences, then used those to color correct.

I have been upressing with Instant HD, then doing noise reduction with Neat Video (I found I couldn't do it to the SD files, because it didn't have enough data to make a a noise profile from), then deartifacting with Magic Bullet Suite, before I throw it into Looks for the majority of the CC work.

I am also tending to throw a bit of diffusion on it to soften the noise and grain even further. However there is only so much I can do with the correction before it starts getting blocky and the artifacting rears it's head some more, so I am very limited by not only from a detail limit, but from how much I can mess with it.

I can filter out all of the noise, but when I do that everything looks so soft and lifeless that it starts looking "watercolorly".
 
Ripping

Ripping

Not sure why your rip would change bit rates. Other than it sounds like it had to de-compress the original 5Mbps and then re-compress it to 10Mbps.
Some of the ripping software assume you don't really need full DVD quality and will re-compress the file to a lower bit rate. It makes it easier to share over the Internet, so I hear. No really, I've never ripped a DVD.
I have just copied VOB files or folders and somehow got them to play in Premiere and such by just renaming the file extensions to something like .MPG. I'm working in PC land. Not sure how that might work if your on a MAC.

You may have just chosen to re-encode at a higher bit rate from the rip software. Not something I would want. I would find some software that extracts the original VOB files and exports just the 5Mbps stream. One less processing step. Any processing is going to hurt the image some.

Everything else sounds like a decent plan.

It's a lot of processing and time. Hope you can make the "look" work for you.
In fact, you'll probably finish the cut and make it just good enough that someone will then pony up the money to telecine the film to HD again.
Then you can do all this work again for free.:emote_headwall:
 
all this testing & rendering has got to equal TIME & $$ ...

a hr worth of 16mm to 1920x1080 ( HQ proRes - you supply hard drive) can be done for under $900 ( and that is 3-1 ratio) ..
if you go one light ( low con transfer) on each reel then figure at most 1.5 - 1 ...

currently it's a buyers market for telecine transfers, audio mix , foley etc ...

take a look at or talk to other telecine houses ...

http://www.cinelicious.tv/
 
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