minimize image quality loss when stabilizing ?

[Jelena5EE9]

Hello you fine people,

I have some 1080p footage in a 1080p timeline and I use external Mercalli plugin to stabilize, at times I use the Premiere image stabilisation. When the image gets cropped and rescaled (stretched) there is a loss in image quality. I am thinking of upscaling the footage of the whole project. What would be the right order to do so? Upscale the source footage? Apply upscaling to the clips after the stabilisation? My project consists of hundreds of source videos and 1000+ video cuts...I was thinking of dragging the whole sequence to a new timeline, hence having one "clip" and applying 4k upscaling to that for a general boost in quality/clarity and then for blu-ray render from that sequence in 1080p. What do you suggest?

Thanks for your help

[Ann Bens]

Stabilizing an image does mean loss in image quality.

Upscaling also means loss in quality.......

Then back to 1080p. Don't think that is a good idea.

[Jelena5EE9]

How come stabilisation does not mean loss of image quality? When a 1920x1080 picture in a 1920x1080 timeline gets stabilised the borders of the image get cut off and the remaining image gets stretched to fill the screen again. So from 1920x1080 some pixels get lost in the process and the image has less pixels after stabilisation and this amount of pixels does not fill the screen and gets stretched to fill the screen again. That must be a loss of image quality.

[Ann Bens]

How come stabilisation does not mean loss of image quality

That is not what I wrote: Stabilizing an image does mean loss in image quality

If you don't want the image scaled up after stabilizing then turn it off in the effect controls.

[Jelena5EE9]

but without scaling it to fit the screen there are black borders because of the stabilisation, crop and hence re-scaling is part of any stabilisation and thus means quality loss