Hi,

I have some footage of an indoors, evening-time, live music performance, shot on 2x mobile camera phones, and wondered if there was a way to - for lack of a better term - uprez both the video and audio?  Thinking out loud here; is there a plug-in (perhaps AI-based) that 'fills in' the image with intelligently-guessed new pixels?  Or is there a company out there that offers this kind of thing in a trancoding service?  Also, syncing the 2 phones' audio tracks - 4x mono, which sounds suprisingly good, though, I am sure, to a professional audio engineer's ears leaves much to be desired - is there a service, perhaps offered by an audio-post house and/or studio recording set-up, that can do something here to bring more vitality to the final audio?

Thank you,

DC 

Media Composer will up rez the footage to whatever the project settings are and does a good job.

Audio is much trickier on any NLE.  The audio may need to be synced up using sounds that are the same on two or more sources.  This is multicamera editing stuff but with audio.

In a pro style shoot, a clapboard is used to create a distinct sound and visual cue for all the sound and video recorders (or someone claps their hands).  If you don't have those obvious cues, it is harder for sure to sync sources.

Some searching for multi microphone editing and multi camera shoots is a good start.

There is decent audio equalization in Media Composer that is a good start for making changes to the quality of the sound.

Hi Robert,

Thank you for getting back to me, although I think maybe I did not express properly what I am looking for.  The footage is shot on a 4K cameraphone, on a tripod, indoors, during the evening.  Therefore, the footage is not acceptable for broadcast - see attached.

I wondered if there is a service that 'uprezzes' the footage (I'm probably using the wrong term here in context) that - for lack of a better term - 'fills in' detail.  Eg., in the attached there are two black t-shirts and one black PA speaker and detail is merely passable.  Is there a service/software/plug-in (perhaps AI-based) that, say, guesses how to 'thicken out' parts of the image so that, as best as possible, overall the footage technically looks much, much better?

D.

Supermandan1:

I wondered if there is a service that 'uprezzes' the footage (I'm probably using the wrong term here in context) that - for lack of a better term - 'fills in' detail.  Eg., in the attached there are two black t-shirts and one black PA speaker and detail is merely passable.  Is there a service/software/plug-in (perhaps AI-based) that, say, guesses how to 'thicken out' parts of the image so that, as best as possible, overall the footage technically looks much, much better?

Do you know any colorists? I don't know about a plug-in, but this is the kind of thing a colorist could give you advice on.

Look into Topaz Video Enhance or Phoenix restoration tools from Filmworkz. Topaz Video is easier to learn and much more affordable. 

Thank you, Philip - both look worth investigating.  DC 

I use Topaz Video AI to up the resolution on all of my old DV tapes. This goes from 29.97 interlaced to FHD 59.94 non-interladed progressive. I also upgrade my interlaced HDV tapes to non-interlaced progressive FHD, and some of my FHD videos go to UHD. I will tell you that it can take a long time to convert from DV to FHD (and you need a GPU to help with this).

But if you start with 4k iPhone footage, how is something like Topaz AI going to uprez that and/or improve the image quality? 

Topaz Video AI will uprez a 4K video to an 8K video. It can also do stabilization, motion deblur and frame interpolation for slow motion from 2x to 16x. You can do this to a 4K video for output from a 4K video input.

Thanks. My point was: what exactly about the footage is it that you need to alter/improve? Without determining what is wrong, a tool like Topaz AI isn't magically going to make any footage simply "look better".

I took a quick look at the still.  Assuming it is a fair representation of the rest of the footage, all that I would recomend is to work with a skilled colorist with good tools.  They would probably do a bit of noise reduction and sharpening.  Probably a bit of windowing to highlight certain sections of the scene.

The biggest issue I see is that there was no set designer and lighting director.    Joking.  But the point is that all you can do is work with what you have.

Jef

One other thought.

If you mean that you are looking for a program to add elements to the scene to make it more "interesting", yes that can be done.  But depending on the amount of footage and a whole lot of details about the footage and your expected results are, it could be frighteningly expensive. 

Now if you are just wanting to do something "playful" (which could be seen as "tacky" by some viewers) you could play with some of the AI based tools in After Effects. 

Jef

DStone:

I use Topaz Video AI to up the resolution on all of my old DV tapes. This goes from 29.97 interlaced to FHD 59.94 non-interladed progressive. I also upgrade my interlaced HDV tapes to non-interlaced progressive FHD, and some of my FHD videos go to UHD. I will tell you that it can take a long time to convert from DV to FHD (and you need a GPU to help with this).

Have you looked into Nucoda/Pheonix/DVO from Filmworkz?

Topaz is great, but the DVO tools from Filmworks are simply the best for restoration. 

Actually, Topaz Video AI sharpens everything. And I do mean everything. Any old DV tapes that I have turn into high-resolution FHD and everything looks much better. I do the same for DVDs as well. Also the performance has improved quite a bit (just not for everything; some older videos can take 12 hours to process; Or 3 hours.)

I recently upgraded a 12-part Flash Gordon video (starring Buster Crabbe) from tape to BluRay. And I created a menu with Chapter Marks. Everything works perfectly well. The image on the bluray is far better than the image on the tape.

I have not looked at the new version of Topaz but the first one I did demo had some severe issues that would have made it not practical for broadcast work.

Specifically when you uprezed footage, the edges of the image did not totally fill the raster.  Created sort of a blanking error issue.  Yes, you could blow the resulting image up again, but that is not the best practice.  And the quality at that time was not a huge leap forward.

I should demo it again if I can.

Jef