4K->1080p - trust camera or video editor to do conversion better?

[larioso]

Hi

If the target photage is 1080p - is it better to run 4K video camera doing that downsizing?

Or should you run photage at 4K and let video editor do that for you?

I watch a lot of tv-series on dvd - and the modern productions are incredible quality even upsizing DVD to 1080p.
It must be really smart math to do that.

I suspect that all is shot at 4K or 8K and then sized down.

I've taken a lot of time lapse photage as stills and then used special care to downsize with cubic and other algos for this purpose. Algorithms that is a visual smart way consider surrounding pixels that are to disappear into one and make it look sharp.

But this was with raw images from still images, then turned into TIF for conversion..

Video is compressed from start - unless using $20,000 cameras or so.

So what is the deal with H264 video - leave it to camera doing a better job using 4K sensor or better and downsize - or editor?
Thinking maybe for video camera has access to images before compressed - and can do a better job, or?
Or is processing power in camera nowhere near what is needed anyway?

What is your view?

Thanks for any input - or even books or other educational material on this.
Best regards

[poisondeathray]

99% of the time you will get better results in software, but try it out yourself and compare. Newer models are getting better, but in the past it was 100% of the time that you'd get significantly better results in software

Cameras have to do this in realtime . They can't afford the processing power and cooling required. Some overheat. Many large sensor cameras were plagued by line skipping / pixel binning (drop every nth pixel) instead of doing a proper resize because they weren't fast enough to process everything . This lead to moire/aliasing problems . The first few generations of DSLR's used for video were notorious for this

[larioso]

Many thanks for input.

Makes sense what you say, thanks.

I've used PowerDirector för 1080p and been ok, no clue how good a job it does downsizing.
I'm thinking of a camcorder that do slow motion in 4k 25p - so thinking to move to 4k for all video.
For some reason is this camera doing 1080p slow motion only to 50p - so there you go.

Should I switch to something else for editor, or?
I have download DaVinci Resolve but not installed yet.

[poisondeathray]

I would spend a few minutes with a few editing software titles to see what you prefer. Most are fairly capable these days - it's the layout , GUI and workflow that mostly sets them apart. It's time well spent playing with a few to see what you like


Most video editors use some variation of bicubic/cubic for scaling . I would not choose an editor based on scaling characteristics - it's near bottom of the list for criteria when choosing an editor

"Too sharp" is possible UHD downscaling depending on the camera.

It's nice to be able to have multiple options . Sometimes you want more softer scaling, especially if your UHD footage is already very sharp and crisp



Most video editors should be able to handle common types of in-camera "slow mo" recording modes . You just "interpret" the footage . It's called different things in different software. Essentially you assign a frame rate to it. e.g. if you had 100 frames at 50p, you interpret it to 25p for 1/2 speed. It's the same 100 frames, just played back at 25fps .

[larioso]

Appreciate your insight on this, thanks. Sound advice.