Hi T.J.,
As I understand what you've written,
You have 30p fps original video, correct?
You segmented portions of that video and produced it to 120p fps, correct?
You now want to bring both sets of video back together and merge them but you consider the Produced output to be poor quality, correct?

May I ask why have you up-scalled the 30p fps video to 120p in the first place?

If your intention was to induce Video Speed (SloMo) then you should have chosen the Power Tool option and finally produced to 30p fps.

Video degradation depends upon what format you are choosing as the output and what actions you take. For example, if you had mp4's and chose wmv and then back to mp4, it is likely to be degraded somewhat.

Not sure I've helped a lot, as I don't see the point of the up-scalling to a frame rate 4x the original. I also wonder if you upscalled the bitrate by 4x to retain the frame quality, have you?

Dafydd

Edit: Adding a bit and correcting a little.

Dafydd,

Excellent, thank you. When I first segmented portions of the original 30p fps video into clips, I was simply focused on making those clips and wanted the highest quality output possible. Intuitively, I would expect that "up-scaling" isn't possible - what good would it do to produce 120p clips when the source file is 30p? However, there is a noticeable quality improvement between the two (perhaps going with 120p and a higher bitrate helps compensate for some degradation that occurs from making the clips?), so I went with 120p.

Now, several weeks later, I went to make a "movie" combining several of the clips. That is when I ran into my problem.

Yes, when I produced the clips, the bitrate was 4X higher as well.

With this additional info, do you have any additional advice to add? Would you say that "upscaling" in the first place is a mirage, that a 30p clip should look the same as a 120p clip when the original source file is 30p? Is there a different way to approach this?

Many thanks - I appreciate all the advice I can get.

T.J.

Hi T.J.,
Upscalling, as you've described your actions, is a pointless exercise in my view, you cant improve upon the original quality.

Use Intelligent SVRT and render the clips, no changes made, (additions) then no alteration in the original clips.

Are you using Shadow Edit files? Just wondered.

I'm all for messing around and seeking to find the best, upscalling isn't the best, likely to be a waste of effort.

Dafydd

Hi T.J. -

I agree with the comments above. Recording at 30fps and producing at 120fps is not "upscaling" at all. All it does is create a lot of extra (duplicate) frames).

Example: The original clip is 30fps, so the frames go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... 30 then repeat for each second of video. If you produce that to 120fps, the frames will go 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6... 30, 30, 30, 30 then repeat. All PDR can do is duplicate the frames because it has no other information.

Higher frame rate video only has an advantage if that's how it was recorded.

Cheers - Tony
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