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Instant HD by Red Giant is a plug-in for applications like After Effects, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. It scales existing video footage from standard definition to high definition or even 2K film resolution.
Instant HD is what you call a boring plug-in. It has few controls that enable you to mess up things, while the output takes some time to render. I tested Instant HD with Final Cut Pro on my trusted Power Mac G5. It took 25 minutes to scale a screen recording made with ScreenFlow and exported into PAL DV, to DVCPRO 720p in Final Cut Pro.
The resulting quality, however, was identical to the source file. But I’m running ahead of myself. Instant HD works with Adobe products and with Final Cut Pro, but it doesn’t work in identical ways in those applications. In the Adobe applications, Instant HD provides for a workflow that is straightforward and easy: You tell the plug-in the input size and the output size, perhaps tune a couple of settings, and you’re done.
In Final Cut Pro, things are less straightforward due to how Final Cut works. In Final Cut Pro, I had to first create a sequence, load the source clip into that sequence, then create another sequence into which the first one had to be nested, and then run the plug-in. In Final Cut Pro, Instant HD has no output size settings. That’s because you have to choose the output setting in advance, by setting up your project in the output format you need (Audio/Video Settings).
The Instant HD manual guides you through the process, but leaves out a couple of important steps, such as not clicking the OK button when Final Cut asks you if you want the sequence in which you’re dragging your source to adapt to your clip.
Three quality options in Filter Type
The whole process is a bit more cumbersome in Final Cut, but once you know what you’re doing, it’s not a big deal. And the results are stunning. My source was of a bad quality as a result of the G5 having the hiccups again—the ScreenFlow recording stuttered, something that doesn’t happen when everything is running fine—and that showed in the recording. Nevertheless, the source and the scaled result looked identical.
They looked identical with the default settings for sharpness, antialiasing and quality. I’m sure I could have improved the output somewhat by raising the quality slider a bit, but I already selected the “Better” Filter type setting, so I could also just have opted for the “Best” setting instead of adjusting the three sliders. Whatever you do, in order to see the results, you do need to re-render the video after each adjustment. For obvious reasons, Instant HD can’t show you the end-result dynamically in real-time.
With Instant HD you can scale an SD video to a HD video size without loss of quality. But you’ll have to read through the manual at least once, if you haven’t done this before yet, or if you’re unfamiliar with square pixels, the differences between PAL, NTSC and HD formats, etc. Because Instant HD gives you the option to “fit to fill”, you can quite easily resize an SD video and have the top and bottom parts cut off on a TV screen.
I see that happen a lot on local TV stations, so I suspect that even some broadcast professionals aren’t really aware of how they should resize a video. With Instant HD you can do it the right way and the wrong way; it’s really up to you. But as I said, except for that one crucial choice and the settings that can improve (or deteriorate) the output quality, there’s not much fun to get out of this Red Giant plug-in.
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