Performance
I was actually pretty impressed with the performance of the software, even though it’s not perfect. As a rule of thumb, it gets you about halfway between just having After Effects magnify your footage by 150% and actually shooting in HD. As you can see from the pic of the text on the previous page, you can read all three samples of the script, but the Instant HD does come pretty close to the HD. (If you tweak the sharpness, quality, and anti-aliasing a bit, you can make the text even clearer, but other elements of the shot suffer. This shot was set on default for comparison purposes.) Of course, atmospheric shots like those in high contrast yield even closer results, as you can see from the pic of the sunset below.
As to the performance speed, you're looking at about three times as long to render than just magnifying your footage by 150%, which isn't too bad, actually. When we tested it on our slowest machine (which has a 2 Ghz P4 with 512 MB RAM), we were only looking at about 90 minutes of rendering time for a ten minute clip in After Effects 7. If you're using one of the Core Duos with a decent amount of RAM and Gridiron's NucleoPro, you'll be looking at just a little over twice Realtime.
Value
For $99, this is a pretty useful software package for folks who need to upconvert footage. The folks who I think would get the most value out of this would be those working in the documentary or historical narrative realm. However, it wouldn’t be a bad call for folks who want to upconvert their SD films down the road when the winner of the BlueRay/HD DVD war is crowned and the appropriate burners drop in price.
Final Comments While it’s not going to let feature filmmakers use SD footage in most normal films, InstantHD could be very valuable to folks who are doing documentary work or to filmmakers who need a closer approximation of HD from SD than normal After Effects scaling techniques. If it’s something you might have need of, then you owe it to yourself to try the demo at Red Giant’s website.
Ease
of Use
9.0
Depth
of Options
7.5
Performance
8.5
Value
8.0
Overall
Score
8.3
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
