Upconverting SD to HD with Topaz Enhance in Premiere

Click the video to start playing, or watch it on YouTube. The original source file is here: airplane.mov (7.3 MB)
Right click the link and click "Save As" to download it. For more information check out Topaz Enhance's User's Manual.

Topaz Enhance  

for windows



for mac

professional video
enhancement plug-in suite

Transcript of video

Hi, Eric from Topaz Labs here. In this video tutorial we’ll walk through a step-by-step approach to high-quality SD to HD upconversion.

We will use Topaz Enhance with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 on Windows to upconvert a 480i SD video clip into high-quality 720p HD. In order to follow along you will need airplane.mov, which is downloadable from this page. You will also need Topaz Enhance version 2.2, available at our website topazlabs.com, and Premiere Pro CS3, although you can still follow along with After Effects or Final Cut Pro as well. We will be completing the task with only one filter included in Topaz Enhance called Topaz Enlarge*, which is a combo filter especially suited for video upconversion.

So let’s begin by opening up Premiere Pro CS3. Before creating a new project, let’s first take a look at our video and what we would like to do with it.

Let’s open up the clip and check the video information. Here we can see that right now the size is 720 by 480 at 29.97 frames per second. If we stop the video at a point with some motion, we can also see that the video is interlaced. What we want to do is take this 480i DVD clip and enhance it into a progressive 1280 by 720 HD-quality clip.

To do that let’s go back into Premiere and create a new project. For our purposes select the HDV 720p30 preset. Here we see that it is indeed 29.97 fps and 1280 by 720p. Please note that when using Topaz Enhance in Premiere, your project must be progressive – even if your footage is interlaced – or Topaz Enhance will not work correctly.

Go ahead and name the project whatever you want; I will name it airproject and click OK. Here’s our project. Import airplane.mov by going to File->Import and selecting the file. Now, we must do several things specific to Adobe Premiere before we begin:

First, go to the video quality button and select Highest Quality. This will make sure Topaz Enhance has enough information to work with. Second, select the airplane clip and go to Clip->Video Options. Turn Frame Blend Off, and make sure that Field Options is set to None. This is necessary because Topaz Enhance must have the original video as input, without having Premiere do anything to it. It’s important that you do this every time before you start using Topaz Enhance filters. This is discussed in more detail in our User’s Manual.

Now let’s drag the airplane footage into Sequence One. Here we see that all that’s happened is we put a 480i SD clip onto a 720p HD canvas. So nothing has really happened yet. But all we need to do now is go to Video Effects->Topaz Enhance-> and Enlarge, and set the Video Type to Lower Field First. And there we go!

We did crop out a little bit from the top and the bottom. No problem, we can just use Premiere’s native transform functions to change it to exactly where we want it, just like that. Now all we have to do is render away, and we have a high-quality HD video in less than 5 minutes using Topaz Enhance.

The reason Topaz Enlarge is so effective is because it can actually increase the detail and resolution of the original footage by using information contained in time. In other words, Topaz Enhance finds information hidden in the frames before and the frames after in order to most effectively regenerate true video information when upscaling. Other methods create a far lower quality result because they are interpolating information and basically just creating junk information.

Thanks for watching! For more video tutorials and other information, please visit our website at topazlabs.com. As always, if you ever have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to contact us at support[at]topazlabs.com or call us at 972-383-1588.

Back to Topaz Enhance page