Technical question about 1080p scaled to 4K and then back to 1080p

[yash-lucid]

I have a 4K timeline with 1080p clips scaled to 200%, until I receive the 4K versions to replace.

In the meantime however, I need to export the timeline in 1080p, however they are coming out extremely pixelated at 1080p - I understand this is because AME is doing the following:

- Scales 1080p clip to 200% to fit 4K timeline (acceptable downsampling)

- Takes pixelated 4K timeline and scales back down to 1080p (not acceptable levels of downsampling)

I am doing this by changing the dimensions in Basic Video Settings in Media Encoder. My question is, is there a better way to do this, without creating a separate 1080p timeline?

Thanks

[Peru Bob]

Some users have had good success upscaling video with this, but it's not free:

https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=S-Google-NB-P...

[eckiAMETeam]

Did you try using a 1080p sequence preset? You should be able to change that once the 4k footage comes online.

[Warren Heaton]

@yash-lucid,

For the 1080 export, I'd opt for creating a duplicate Timeline, changing the Frame Size to 1920-by-1080, selecting all 2160 clips, and using Set to Frame Size to scale them to 50%.  With this approach, I'd also enable "Use Maximum Render Quality" (gives better quality scaling but also increases encode time).

For your current workflow, I'd right-click the 1080 clips in the 2160 Timeline and choose Replace with After Effects Composition.  In After Effects, apply Detail-preserving Upscale at 200% (Effect > Distort > Detail-preserving Upscale).  Knowing that 1080 sources will always be scaled to 2160, I'd consider pre-rendering all 1080 clips to 2160 in After Effects before importing the 2160 up-convert versions into your Premiere Pro project.

@Peru Bob's suggestion to use Topaz Video AI is a good option.  You could compare that to After Effect's Detail-preserving Upscale.  If taking that approach, part of your workflow could be processing 1080 clips in Topaz Video AI before importing the 2160 up-convert into your Premiere Pro Timeline.  It's probably worth noting that Topaz has a plug-in for Premiere Pro in beta.

Keep a close eye on how good-quality up-conversions increase render time.

- Warren

[yash-lucid · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the suggestions, however the best solution for me was to duplicate the timeline, and rescale manually.
While it was time consuming, it was more time and render and cost efficient than the suggestions.