Greetings...

I'm facing a tricky matter. I'm working on a sequence (24P film came from 35mm telecined into Betcam SP tapes) on Avid Media composer. Now, I need to upsample the finished footage into (1080:24P) on DS and put the titles on the upsampled sequence. I know that the footage will look horrible...

I export the MCA footage as (Tiff sequental files- 2 minutes duration footage) with the settings of uncompressed and best quality to try to save the best I can. my only concern is what frame size should I pick on MCA and what capture setting should I use on DS so I can get a footage that has the HD look regarding frame size...

Thanks

Dan

Regarding framesize I would export to whatever
native size the project you are working is set for, 
I guess that would be 720x576 in PAL-land
or 720x480 (or is it 486) for NTSC.

This way the "TIFF-chunk" you have to transfer from
the MCA to the DS will be smaller in size.

Then for import in the "Capture Settings" dialogue
you set "Media Conversion" to "Scale To Fit" and
the Pixel Ratio" to "Computer Graphics".

This way the pixels you get IN are scaled up to
the pixels that currently open sequence has.
In your case that would be 1920x1080.

In these matters I find using "Computer Graphics"
easier that than for example PAL (1.07), NTSC whatever.
The total pixelarea is scaled from one size
to another, no matter if it's 4x3, 16x9 or whatvever.

After import you could try to apply the "Sharpen"-effect
to the clip/clips just to make the "blurry" picture a
little crisper. And maybe the occasional producer
a bit more content. :-)

I find that the range for using "Sharpen" is
much better in a HD-sequence than in a SD-sequence.
In a SD-sequence is more or less on or off, and often
kind of useless, but  in HD you get a little more control.

Just one final thing about TIF-files. Using for example 
LZW-compressing when exporting a TIF-sequence doesn't
do any bad things to the picture because LZW is a
"lossless data compression algorithm". I.e it looks
for similar patterns in the file and reduces the filesize
that way. So depending on what material you have
in the picture the filesize can shrink dramatically
when using LZW-compressing compared to using
no compression at all. Say, for an animated part
with big areas of similar colours, a single TIF-file
(720x576) can shrink from 1,2MB to maybe 80kB.
So that's one thing to think about when it comes
to how the sequence shall be distributed to the
machine that's going to import it. You might even
get by with fitting a whole animation on a single CD.
At least in theory. :-)

The downside of using compression is of course
the time it takes to compress (from the MCA)
and then to expand the compressed files when
you import them into the DS. I have no figures
on the timedifference and it might even be an
insignificant difference.

So, good luck!

//mike

I think Mike gave you a very good workflow. 

But I will offer a siightly different workflow.

I would choose Keep Original Size and Position in the Media Conversion selection.  And I would also choose Computer Graphics

This will bring the footage into the HD project as a pixel to pixel importing.  No resizing, no changes.

At this point your aspect ratio of the imported material is wrong and the picture is to small.  You correct both in one step with a DVE resize and re-position.

My method lets you choose the filtering which the first method does not.  And you will only be manimpulating the pixels once.

The render MIGHT be longer in the end, but you will have more options.

Cheers,

Jef

You could also just consolidate the sequence with handles to a hard drive and for the metadata - under "file" "Send to Avid DS". On the DS side, configure your MXF storage using the "Configure Storages" option (check your manual if unsure how)" and move the original captured media there. Exporting to Uncompressed .tif files won't gain you anything except additional output time.

However, since you've already made the tifs, it won't hurt to use them. I would follow Jef's process, just to have the better control over the DVE resize. You could try the sharpen filter on just one, or a combination of channels, for instance, just sharpening the blue channel can get you better results sometimes.

Good Luck