Help on resize filters, please

[Álex Montoya]

Lanczos, Mitchell, bicubic, quadric... What's the best one for each job (downsizing, upsizing)?

Anyone can shed a bit of light here or point sites where it is explained?

Right now I am exporting 2K dpx's form 4K 2:1 R3D's for a project and I am usign Lanczos for the simple reason that it sounds wicked...

 

[Dave Blackham]

Lanczos, Mitchell, bicubic, quadric... What's the best one for each job (downsizing, upsizing)?

Anyone can shed a bit of light here or point sites where it is explained?

Right now I am exporting 2K dpx's form 4K 2:1 R3D's for a project and I am usign Lanczos for the simple reason that it sounds wicked...

Are you using Apple's Compressor to resize for QuickTime files ? It uses their fluid motion algorithms which were developed for Shake and it can produce very good results al be it processor intensive. If youd like some presets i can build you couple but would need to know the target frame sizes.

Dave
UK

 

[Dominic Jones]

Hi Dave, I think he's talking about redcine/redrushes/etc downsample filter options...

This is not my field of expertise whatsoever, but by my reckoning from a pure eyeball test (which is my field of expertise!) lanczos and catmulrom are the best options for 99% of footage, and there's not much in it between them. Haven't done a speed comparison though, so there may be some advantage to one or the other there.

Oh, I should add that I've not tried upsizing any footage, as we're finishing all of our projects at 2k or 1080p here, so there may be better options for that...

 

[Dave Blackham]

Yep I think your right. Anyway I have a few recepies for resize if they are of any help to any one.

Dave
UK

 

[Álex Montoya]

Yeah, sorry for not explaining that.

I'm just looking for some info on how each filter works.

 

[Dominic Jones]

Love to hear what you've got to say on the resizing recipes Dave - as I said, I don't really know anything about the technical side of all of this, and I'm always keen to expand the old knowledge bank!

As an aside (sorry for drifting a little OT here Concrete, hope you don't mind), is there any way you know of to do better quality resizing in AE than the standard scale tool? I was finishing a project recently that featured interviews comped into graphic novel artwork (which was pretty high res), and had a bugger of a time killing moire by hand - blurring and slightly mosaicing the original (high res) artwork before downsizing it to 1080p - hellish, as it's a very tight balancing act between reducing moire to acceptable levels and retaining decent definition for the text and fine detail.

Also, whilst we're at it, are there any decent resize filter plugins for FCP that you know of?

Cheers!
Dom.

 

[amrrahmy]

before u read, different software can have different ideas or ways to how a filter work or use them slightly different, testing a very smalll file that would have alot of resize problem helps identify what program would be the best to work with and always remember that u can res to something and then manupilate the image or transcode in full res and resize in a different video or photo application and with more manupilation options to get real quality down-resizing.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-resize-for-web.htm

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-interpolation.htm

this one for up-sizing:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-photo-enlargement.htm

u can check wiki for more info i think.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm tutorial home


edit: forgot, this doesn't exactly include gradient or smooth surface, keep that in mind, resizing to something with very smooth color transition, or to a smaller bit depth.

also i think there was a 2:1 reduction option, that's as good as it gets and with (i think build 17), there was an announcement about a (something*2160) option so u can use the 2:1 reduction and produce 1080p with the best results.

 

[Mike Harrington]

Lanczos, Mitchell, bicubic, quadric... What's the best one for each job (downsizing, upsizing)?

Anyone can shed a bit of light here or point sites where it is explained?

Right now I am exporting 2K dpx's form 4K 2:1 R3D's for a project and I am usign Lanczos for the simple reason that it sounds wicked...

you picked the best one for upscaling(in my opinion)

a good explanation on some
http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=315

if you want technical here ya go
http://www.worldserver.com/turk/computergraphics/ResamplingFilters.pdf

basically Lanczos seems the best.....
for downsizing that may be different....

the old way to fix 4:1:1 footage in fusion was to downsize the blue channel
to 1/4 rez with nearest neighbor...then uprez the blue back to full rez with catmull -rom

btw catmul rom (and catmull-clark subdivision)
developed by pixar founder Ed Catmul....now president of disney