Don't have the money or budget to afford a nice HDV Camcorder? No problem, we'll show you how to convert your Standard DV footage to HDV footage with no loss of quality.
Let's take a look at some regular DV footage I captured the other day. Notice that size of the footage in Viewer is 720 x 480. We'll resize this to HDV resolution 1920 x 1080.
Alright let's head on over to your FileIn node and load the parameters for it. In the parameters there is a timing tab. Click on this and scroll down till you see reTiming parameter. There are four options to choose from.
None
No retiming is applied to your clip
Speed
Let's you change the overall speed of your clip.
Remap
Let's your change the speed of your clip using a curve.
Convert
Allows you to convert your media to other formats.
For this tutorial we will be using the Convert option.
The InputFrameRate and OutputFrameRate can be used to convert your footage from one format to another. If your not converting your footage to another format then leave the OutputFrameRate alone, it's automatically set to the InputFrameRate value. I changed mine from Film to NTSC and clicked on the InputFrameInterlaced radio button.
Now comes the fun part, let's stretch our footage to a larger size. If you've worked with any resize feature in any other graphic software you know that the larger you make your footage the more pixelated it becomes. Resizing with the OutputRes parameter will result in a higher quality than any of the other Shake Transform tools.
I've set my OutputRes value to 1280 x 908. You can play around with the size, just remember that there are limits to how big you can stretch any footage. Try to stay within a reasonable range.
Alright now that we've resized our new footage let's touch it up a bit before we start to composite with it.
The Recursive when turned on will sharpen your image enlarged footage. Be careful because it can also increase the noise. It's best to scrub through your footage and test it on different frames in I turned on the AntiAlias because this will smooth any jagged edges that might appear in my footage.
The Details slider is a built-in sharpening tool that can actually distinguish between noise and feature details. This allows it to sharpen your images without increasing unwanted grain. The jagged lines created by this option will be smoothed out by the AntiAlias option.
The Motion option should remain on Fast unless you plan on doing any retiming then you can set it to Best.
DeInterlacing options are similar to Motion. The parameters Fast and Best let you choose the trade-off between image quality and processing time.
Now if you haven't notice my footage as a little black border on the top and bottom of the viewer. This is because we are going from Standard DV to HDV footage. HDV is square pixels and DV is not.
What we need to do is use select the Resize radio button to convert the DV to HDV aspect ratio. Now my footage fits the viewer perfectly.
The Convert parameter is a new feature in Shake 4.