Sharpen DV footage after upscale to HDV

Question

I have some DV footage that I'm using in an HDV sequence and have upscaled it to mach the resolution of the HDV footage (1080i), what's the best way to get rid of the resulting blurriness?

I'm using premiere pro.

Answer 1

Since you're scaling 2x or more, your best bet is to upscale the DV again using Avisynth with the nnedi rpow2 filter, then scale, if necessary, to HDV.

(With some tangible details, I can provide an example script.)

Trying to sharpen the upscaled videos will produce worse results than the above method.

Answer 2

Upscaling an image is always difficult as you can never completely recover the details. There are some tools, however, that can give you a higher-quality and sharper result than the typical resizing algorithms used in most players and editors (nearest neighbor, bilinear, bicubic). Some options that you might like to explore:

• If you’re familiar with AviSynth scripting, checkout the nnedi3 rpow2 function [freeware]

• Adobe After Effects (and possibly Premiere Pro now?) has a feature called Detail-preserving upscale

• DaVinci Resolve 15 has a feature called “Super Scale”

• Topaz Gigapixel AI uses advanced AI datasets to upscale images and fill in missing information. It’s designed for still images but you can use it for video by exporting all frames as images, upscaling and then recombining.