upscaling 480p to 1080p - an impossible task ?

You're correct that 720 might be more realistic. A lot will depend on the quality of the SD material.

In Compressor, mark a short, but representative section and test the effect of different adjustments in the Quality section of the Inspector.

I don't have the Red Giant product, s I can't comment.

If it's a very important project, consider outso the upscaling to someone who has converter hardware.

Good luck,

Russ

Black Magic Teranex is a hardware solution, you would play our SD source files through it and it will uprez them to HD.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/teranex

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/teranex/workflow

The Teranex is in use world wide, you may be able to locate a production facility near you that can do the conversion for you.

Do a short test sample first - like all conversion processing, the higher quality source files you have will give you better results.

Depending on the length of the file that you are trying to uprez, using the better upscaling in the latest versions of Photoshop may be worth a try.

Output an image sequence, set an action in Photoshop to upscale the image size, run the action on the individual frames, and then reimport the upscaled images as an image sequence.

This may become cumbersome if you have a lot of footage to upscale.

MtD

We do this regularly with our archival footage from ye olde 3/4" and Betacam days. We just drop it straight into a timeline and let FCPX do the scaling. the biggest headache is filling the pillars.

All upscaling is a compromise. You can throw money at it and buy specialized hardware or well-researched software. You've got to figure out the relative values of your alternatives.

We thought it was SUPER important to have SUPERB upscaling. Didn't turn out to be the case. No one in the production workflow really cared much once we looked at the various options.

We go to 1080 regularly.

Your tolerance for pixelation will determine how much money you must throw at this project.

The math is not difficult:

a. 720x480 = about 340,000 pixels

b. 1920x1080 = about 2,100,000 pixels

b/a = about 6 so every pixel is being blown up about 6 times to fill the entire space. Which isn't accurate at all since the HD frame is only 2.25X taller than SD and there are the Pillars of Blackness that don't really count.

Besides, we usually don't fill all the way to the top and bottom, preferring to allow future video geeks to do their own cropping. It all gets pretty crunchy without external processing of some kind, for sure. It's all about the $ and our people, who have the money, said, "Eh."

Upscaling video will in no way improve the quality . . . quite the reverse, as any additional compression can only degrade the image, albeit slightly.

Just stick it straight in the 1080p timeline along with the normal HD footage . . . you won't get any better quality than that.

I agree, in many cases it is appropriate that the footage "look" archival anyway.

MtD

You say you have dropped it into a 1080p timeline and it looked bad?

Did you render it or were you playing it unrendered?