Product ReviewsMultimedia software
The appearance of camcorders such as Sony's HDR-FX1 has given thousands of budget-conscious freelancers and prosumers licence to step up to high-definition production. Final Cut Pro now handles HDV very nicely, but what are we to do with all that archive footage we've been shooting on standard-definition DVCAM all this time? In the long-term, the correct solution is to re-shoot it all in high definition, but until then, Red Giant provides a neat working solution with Instant HD. Red Giant has already caught our attention with its excellent range of Magic Bullet colour grading plug-ins, leaving us very excited about Instant HD, which is designed to upsample video footage for use at higher resolutions. It's a job that flies in the face of logic, but there are many occasions in which an editor might need to add standard-definition footage to an HDV documentary - or work low-resolution footage from a mobile phone or webcam into a DVCAM project. Instant HD promises to go beyond the abilities of Final Cut's own compositing and scaling tools to deliver extremely high-quality resampling. Instant HD is available for Final Cut Pro 4.1 and Adobe After Effects 6 or later. Regardless of which host application you go for, the plug-in sits neatly in its Effects palette and integrates seamlessly into the established workflow. Applying Instant HD in After Effects is a doddle: simply add the footage to a composition, add the Instant HD filter and select the required target resolution from a drop-down list. The list is comprehensive, including full-screen and widescreen DV and D1 resolutions for PAL and NTSC standards, as well as 720p and 1080i HDV resolutions. There's also support for true 16:9 1080 HD at 1920 x 1080. At the top end of the resolution scale is 2048 x 1556, and when working from 4:3 source material, there are also options to crop the image for 16:9 presentation. Things
If you're not working to any standardised resolution, there's a custom option that enables users to manually specify target dimensions. On top of this, there are quantitative controls for quality, antialiasing and sharpness. All controls are based on a sliding scale from zero to 25. Quality affects the number of samples used per pixel of image. A mid-range setting often produces the best results. Antialiasing smoothes out edges of objects, helping get rid of jaggedness caused by the magnification of pixels. Antialiasing can also give rise to a slight blurring, so the final Sharpness filter helps crispen up the picture - but shouldn't be overused. Upsampling standard-definition DV material to 1080i HDV worked well, and looked far better than we'd normally expect, but as it's impossible for any software application to replace detail that was never there in the original source, you'll still see a lot of difference between this material and footage that was originally shot in high definition. There was a slight softness and noise to the upsampled image, but it generally looked good. In a second test, highly compressed Mpeg-1 (recorded at a resolution of 320 x 240) was upsampled to PAL DV. Again, the results were impressive, but the game was given away more obviously due to the fact that the source material's low frame rate of 15fps isn't altered by Instant HD. Instant HD clearly does a better job of upsampling video than we've seen by just zooming footage in Final Cut Pro or After Effects, but it's important to remember that no such tool can do a good enough job to make standard-definition video look like it was shot in HD. The need for such a plug-in is also very clear - particularly for documentary video makers and journalists who can't be fussy about where their source material comes from or in what formats it arrives. Considering the job it does, and its usefulness to the broadcast and professional sector, Red Giant's asking price of $99 seems like peanuts. By Peter Wells
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