You may be looking for the video enhancements in fix/enhance. Then you can produce to a larger format with improved quality. I have only used it on small projects and I do not know how big you can get, but 1080 may be stretching it a bit. __________________________________
CORNBLOSSOM

Garbage in, garbage out. That was the rule, not too long ago. Like Jaime says, Fix/enhance>Video Enhancement.
You may also try rendering to different formats to see if that helps any. Another "trick" is to not put your video full screen, but stay within the center, making the video as big as you dare, and fill the remaining background border with a relevant image (blurred), or even your video (blurred). It's the same thing I do for putting 4:3 video in a 16:9 project. HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
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Quote: I have an old video file from 2008 that is 720x480P. It's soooooo small these days, lol.

I thought I had seen some Cyberlink promos a while back claiming something to the effect of "upscaling"? But I cannot find any reference to it now.

Is there a way to make a video production larger in size without it looking like rubbish?

I produced the referenced video in 1280x720 and it was so pixelated it was just awful.

Thanks!

-Tom

Hi Tom,

Another approach to upscaling your original 720x480P video is to use a post production method. I have used this method with pretty good success. I have lots of older scuba diving videos that I captured off of my old Sony Hi-8 video camera and I captured them using the 720x480 resolution in a mpg-2 format. So I am in the same boat so to speak as you.

If you make a DVD at that original 720x480 resolution with its original unenhanced attributes, I then "upscale" the quality during playback of the DVD and I am pretty happy with the quality. If I play it back on my Home Media Center using PowerDVD 12 or 13, I select the TrueTheatre Enhancements and can adjust the quality to a nice level on my 55" TV. I can also choose to either stretch the screen to fill the 16:9 screen.....or not too and keep it at the original 4:3 aspect ratio. You have more flexibility post production in my opinion. I use it to play all my current digitally recorded unedited video clips and can apply other enhancements like video stabilization that makes viewing the unedited clips more viewable, I don't always hold the camera very steady and PowerDVD can correct it "on the fly".

If you have a stand-a-lone DVD player that has upscaling capabilities, you might also be pleased with the results. Again you can play the DVD at the original 4:3 aspect ratio or choose to stretch it to fill a 16:9 aspect screen. You can decide if the squashing and stretching of the video is ok with you. There are many algorithms used for upscaling, some are better than others and can help eliminate any jagged lines that result from increasing the resolution. They all have to add additional pixels in some way...line doubling or sampling adjacent pixels to try to decide what to fill in the new blanks

Just another thought I would share another approach.

I have had some positive results though by applying the Fix/Enhance to these older video clips with PowerDirector. But it is like trying to make a 16" Pizza out of 8" inch pizza worth of dough. It will have to be stretched to fill the 16" pan and you may not like "thin crust pizza" that much!

Kevin
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Awesome info guys, thanks so much! ~Tom~

Some DVD players with upscaling do a fairly good job. If you have a way to capture HD, that may be an option. I know there are several brands of HD capture devices designed for gamers. Just take the DVD player upscaled output into one of these devices connected to the PC.

I have tons of old video and have been procrastinating. LOL I wish there was a way to burn standard def MPEG 2 files as is to Bluray. Intel i7 4770k, 16GB, GTX1060 3GB, Two 240GB SSD, 4TB HD, Sony HDR-TD20V 3D camcorder, Sony SLT-A65VK for still images, Windows 10 Pro, 64bit
Gary Russell -- TN USA

Gary wrote:

I have tons of old video and have been procrastinating. LOL I wish there was a way to burn standard def MPEG 2 files as is to Bluray.

Gary ,

It is possible to burn Standard Definition video to Blu-Ray. Select the "Create Disc" tab, select Blu-Ray Disc, and then under the encoding format and quality settings select mpg-2 SD 720x480 profile. You can squeeze quite a bit of Standard Definition video onto the Blu-Ray disc.


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Thanks - haven't used PD11 that much. I'll need to explore more. Intel i7 4770k, 16GB, GTX1060 3GB, Two 240GB SSD, 4TB HD, Sony HDR-TD20V 3D camcorder, Sony SLT-A65VK for still images, Windows 10 Pro, 64bit
Gary Russell -- TN USA

There is such a thing as upscaling. In theory a conversion process examines standard definition video footage (like 720x480) and by looking at previous and next frame data, can intelligently extrapolate data to upscale and enhance the footage. This works best with footage such as talking heads and works worse with motion footage like a football game.

Kmot, I've wondered the same thing. I thought PD was advertised to have upscaling, but can't find anything yet that addresses that.

Rob wrote:There is such a thing as upscaling. In theory a conversion process examines standard definition video footage (like 720x480) and by looking at previous and next frame data, can intelligently extrapolate data to upscale and enhance the footage. This works best with footage such as talking heads and works worse with motion footage like a football game.

Kmot, I've wondered the same thing. I thought PD was advertised to have upscaling, but can't find anything yet that addresses that.


Hi Rob,

Yes, Power Director does have upscaling. Jaime pointed out where it is in the Fix/Enhance. Select a video clip on the timeline and the Fix/Enhance button will appear. Then select the "Video Enhancement", which improves the sharpness of a video and applies an up sampling technology that improves video quality. There is also a slider control that you can apply different degrees of this affect. This is one of Cyberlinks True Theatre Technology tools. There are others too.lighting adjustment, stabilizer, video denoise, etc.

Then when you go to the Produce area to create your video you can then select a video profile that has a larger resolution. So you could increase a 720x480 video to say 1280x720 or even try 1920x1080, which may be a bit of a stretch.

Experiment and see what works for you.

Kevin

Thanks, Cap'n Kevin and Jamie and others, I've used fix/enhance before but this is the first time I noticed that the button includes the statement "improves the sharpness of a video and applies an up sampling technology..." Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention or perhaps the addition of the statement is new.

In my experiment, it worked. I took some B&W 740x480 SD footage and applied various settings of fix/enhance and rendered it to 1080. I made some decisions about cropping and masking to adapt the 4:3 footage to 16:9. The result was decent. This should work well for my needs to include SD footage in an HD production. Within reasonable expectations and careful composition (like Barry suggested), this is a useful tool and confirms Cyberlink's claims are true.

For those who like to dig further, there are some utilities and plug-ins (for editing software other than PowerDirector) that claim to upsample an image while upscaling. That of course goes beyond the scope of this forum.

Alright fella's, you have helped a lot!

I used the Fix/Enhance function and tried it at various settings from 50 to 100. The aliasing is pretty intense at 100, and 65 was not much of an improvement over 50 and the aliasing was still a little too much.

So I settled on 50% and then produced a video at 1920x1080. It's not very sharp, but at least it is not pixelated. It is decent enough to watch and can be watched full screen on my monitor.

Interestingly, the video is on Youtube but YT says it is still 480P. Even so, you can watch it full screen.

~Tom~

YT has now updated it to 1080P. ~Tom~

That looks EXCELLENT.
Ya know, we get all tied in knots over perfect video quality, but I say content is King. You have a really cool video, nice bright colors, fun-to-watch subject, what more could you want?
HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
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Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
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https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

Nice video. My first 720p camera does not take video that clear. __________________________________
CORNBLOSSOM

Thank you, Barry and Jaime. ~Tom~