AVI to HD

[JaredKnight]

I would like a suggestion for a program to convert my camcorder minidv tape (AVI) to HD. The camcorder is not HD.

[zoobie]

and I would like a suggestion for a program to convert water into wine

[JaredKnight]

So, what is this 4Media Video Converter program($39) I found. a scam. It talks about converting avi to hd.

[edDV]

Why do you want lower quality video?

[JaredKnight]

how much lower quality? I'm not particular. Time is not right to get HD camcorder, yet.

[guns1inger]

In short, yes, it is a scam. They are taking the widest possible view that HD is simply getting the resolution up to 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720. So all it does is resize up the video and re-encode. Fine. It is HD. But the quality look like a badly rescaled standard definition video.

The basic issue is that your standard definition video contains less than 25% of the image data that HD video contains. That is a lot of data that needs to be interpolated fr4om existing information to create HD. Can it be done ? of course. The question really should be can it be done well.

There are very simple resize methods for upscaling video, and there are very complex methods. Complex methods are, well, complex, involving motion vectors and heavy math. They are slow, and the results can be variable. Simple methods are very fast, and you can do them using virtualdub, avisynth, and most other free converters. They will certainly do a job equal to, if not better than, the $39 toy you mentioned earlier.

The first question you need to ask is why do you need to upscale the video ?

Is it simply for playback on a HD device ? If so, chances are your TV or player will upscale better on-the-fly than the software.

If it is to include with HD material when editing then perhaps it is worth looking at a proper upscaler.

The other reason not to upscale if it is only for playback is that once you have encoded your new 'HD' video, you are locked into whatever your result is. However upscaling technology continues to improve, and the next playback device or TV you get will most likely have something superior to whatever software you used to create your file.

However if you want to play, I would look at either VideoEnhancer (cheap and cheerful, but works well for the price) or RedGiant.

[JaredKnight]

Thank you, I appreciate the info. Will wait. It was just 25 min of my son's wedding. I probably would not do it for anything else. If I do, will put the $39 towards the HD camcorder.