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Nearest neighbor scaling (sampling) - simple and vital

After Effects allows you to use Bicubic, bilinear, and nearest neighbor ("draft") for scaling. (Also known as "sampling" or "interpolation.")

Premiere should absolutely have the option for the Motion effect to use Nearest Neighbor. (It would still be bicubic by default, as it is now.)

This is very important for sprite art, screenshots, screen recordings, etc.

Here is a forum thread on the issue from 2012, where most people unfortunately don't even understand what the problem is:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1061901

NOTE: The TRANSFORM effect currently has the option for bilinear and bicubic. It would be good to add nearest neighbor here, but that should not be the ONLY place where it is available. The Transform effect still has severe issues with buggyness, instability, and choppy movement. Again, it is important that the MOTION effect has the option for Nearest Neighbor.

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TaranVH shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
Under Review  ·  AdminFrancis Crossman (Product Manager, Adobe DVA) responded  · 

Currently, Premiere uses the Lanczos method for intrinsic scale and rotation. Lanczos is an exceptionally high-quality interpolation method which generally yields better results than bicubic, bilinear or nearest neighbor. From reading the forum post, it seems that up-scaling is the real issue here. I suggest looking at the Detail-Preserving Upscale effect in After Effects. It does a really good job and gives you some parameters to tweak to fit your specific content.

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  • Dave E commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Antoine Autokroma that plugin is useless. i own it. it crashes constantly when in use.

  • Jeremy Smolik commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Also bumping this thread, shouldn't need to add an extra PR-AE-PR round trip per clip, even if using dynamic link, to disable the lanczos interpolation. I haven't worked with the Premiere code but I'd assume there's a bypass that can be done?

    Retro style is huge right now, there are tons of 80s review videos of not just shows and commercials, but especially for video games. That's what I do, I make the War Stories videos for Ars Technica, so I'm always using 720, 480, 240 videos, most in 4:3. But when scaling these up, that blur just mimics your eyes being blurry and it's hard to watch. Creates headaches, like walking around without glasses but still trying to see.

    So with a bypass of the lanczos pipeline, is there a way to implement maybe not the exact code for "nearest neighbor" in PS, but something that functions likewise? It'd most likely be a hard effect, requiring pre-rendering to view like with Optical Flow, but that would be totally fine. It sure beats having to send to AE and back when there are dozens of clips. Sometimes dynamic link can get funky, especially if you needed to offline or change media locations. Plus there's the problem of those in/out points being locked when you replace with an AE comp, so you'd need to be at picture lock before being able to see what it looks like.

    The hard crisp edges of the original pixels are a beautiful thing, especially important in these retro review videos. On the old displays the pixels were sharp due to the screen itself, those were the actual pixels that we used to see, so I believe it's very important to be able to preserve that data.

    Thanks Adobe, hope you can add this feature soon! It's the age of retro, we need our 80s/90s pixels :)

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    ***UPDATE:*** (because I can't edit the post)
    Adobe redesigned their forums, and the thread I linked to seems to have gone missing. Here's a screenshot of the whole thread: https://imgur.com/sfw3i2N

    To bump my response to Francis Crossman, which has gotten a bit buried:
    Neither Lanczos nor Detail-Preserving Upscale can solve the problem of preserving sharp pixel edges - only Nearest Neighbor can. I've created all_upscale_comparisons.png to prove it (attached.)

    And here is the the original sprite so that you can try it yourself:
    https://i.imgur.com/Mdnm5lr.gif
    On a 1080p timeline, scale the .gif to 4000% and you will see the same blurry results.

  • Phil Strahl commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @TaranVH That is true and speeds up my workflow at least a little bit until this gets implemented *nudge nudge* ;)

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @phil Yes, but if you use "Replace with after Effects composition," you don't even have to render it from AE and re-import to premiere... the whole thing gets rendered all at the same time at the end.
    Yes, I wish Premiere could do Nearest Neighbor on its own, (thus this feature request) but dynamic linking to AE is the best solution for now. Certainly, better than rendering from Virtualdub!

  • Phil Strahl commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @TaranVH I mean that I don't want to have to round-trip to a different software (even if it's from Adobe) for a feature as simple as manually picking an upscale algorithm. I wish it would work like time interpolation: Right click a clip and pick the algorithm, see the attached mock-up :)

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Phil Strahl
    What do you mean? You can use link to AE and use After Effect's draft mode - it's the same as Nearest Neighbor.
    Just make sure you set it to quality: Current settings.
    There's also sharp-billinear scaling, which can be great for sprite art.
    you should definitely watch this whole video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKV1JFE0_Nk

  • Phil Strahl commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I'd love to have a per-clip option for the scaling algorithm as I work a lot with retro-game footage in tiny resolutions whose sharp pixel edges I want to preserve. Currently, the only way of not having them blur together is to do the scaling in VirtualDub and render out a new file which is tedious and feels unnecessary.

    Please make nearest neighbor / integral scaling an option!

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Antoine
    https://twitter.com/TaranVH/status/1112874478952800256
    GPUresize sucks for Premiere. If you just want 200% or 300% nearest neighbor upscale, you have to calculate the exact Width and Height dimensions manually. And if it goes beyond the frame edges, the X and Y position is offset.
    Also, there's an arbitrary limit (8192) to how far I can upscale using nearest neighbor. So there are 3 things wrong with this implementation.
    ...
    It's also very slow to render, which it shouldn't be, as nearest neighbor is the most basic, least processor-intensive scaling method, when done properly.
    ...
    Currently (Aug 2019) linking to an AE composition that uses "draft" mode is still the best/easiest method for getting nearest neighbor into Premiere.

  • Letty commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Any thoughts on RedGiant's Instant4K vs. PPro's basic upscale? I think the 4K is a pinch better because you can adjust a few settings, but, it's a plugin and not processed by the gpu, so it adds time to an export. It's always something with this software. Any thoughts would be highly appreciated. I'm wondering if PPro is better, but there doesn't seem to be any tests or data on the issue other than 'salesman' pitches online. I wish there was a 3rd party test on those 2.

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Francis Crossman
    I've created a comparison of several up-scaling methods for you to look at. (all upscale comparisons.png)
    As you can see, only Nearest Neighbor provides the desired result with sharp pixel edges - all other methods, including detail-preserving upscale, are blurry.
    Here's a direct link to the sprite so that you can try it yourself:
    https://i.imgur.com/Mdnm5lr.gif
    Put this into a 1080p Premiere sequence and up-scale it to 3000%, and you will see the same blurry result.

    (Note: If you open it in Photoshop and zoom in, it WILL retain its sharp pixel edges, because Photoshop's canvas (correctly) uses Nearest Neighbor for that.)

  • TaranVH commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Francis Crossman
    Thank you for reading and responding to this feature request, but, with all due respect, you don't understand what we're asking for.
    Detail-Preserving Upscale does NOT solve the problem of preserving sharp pixel edges. I've created another comparison to prove it to you.
    This is an extreme example, but the differences between Nearest Neighbor and Lanczos are still noticeable even at 200% and 300%. I can upload more comparisons if you would like.
    I've also uploaded the original sprite so that you can try it yourself. On a 1080p timeline, scale link_sprite.gif to 4000% and you will see the same result.

  • Sean McNally commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Crazy that premiere doesn't have this. They should either implement nearest neighbor, or give the option to disable interpolation altogether!

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