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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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
@Ken : Lanczos interpolation is more advanced than Bicubic interpolation, but that's not what you're looking for here. Vizual PixelPerfect is our FREE plugin to do just what you want https://www.autokroma.com/blog/Vizual-PixelPerfect-Upscale-Pixel-Art-Nearest-Neighbors-Premiere-Pro
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Ken D commented
Francis, Can you explain how Lanczo interpolation actually works and what it does to the nearest pixels. NN, Bilinear and Bicubic seem to all have a clear definition as to what it does and how it works. can you provide that here? I need to be able to explain the interpolation process to others. thanks.
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Jim Trinca commented
Three years and still nothing. Adobe are absolutely useless. If I had the time to learn another NLE I would because your broken software and nonexistent support are a joke.
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Shalev Haham commented
Although Nearest Neighbor is in After Effects, it's a lot of work to open it up every single time I want to upscale a screen capture. If you add this feature to Premiere everyone's life would be much easier. And Adobe Dynamic Link is way too slow to be a GOOD solution here, but for now - it's the only solution I know about.
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Johannes Peter commented
You need a plugin for nearest neighbor interpolation. One free one for example is 'Pixel Perfect Upscale' by Vizual: https://www.autokroma.com/blog/Vizual-PixelPerfect-Upscale-Pixel-Art-Nearest-Neighbors-Premiere-Pro
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Benjamin Bullard commented
The lack of this feature ensures I'll be cancelling my creative cloud subscription once I'm finished college. Nearest neighbor scaling is 100% REQUIRED for interpolating pixel-art. No other form of interpolation is a viable substitute, Lanczos included.
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Jesse Hodson commented
Just throwing my hat in the ring for this. We absolutely need a dropdown within the Scale parameters of a clip. It must include Nearest Neighbor.
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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
We have a new solution for nearest neighbors (pixel art) upscaling in Premiere Pro ! Please test our FREE filter called Autokroma Vizual PixelPerfect, download and install from here https://www.autokroma.com/Vizual
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Troy Gaming commented
please add nearest neighbour scaling to premiere pro, i really need to upscale my pixel arts properly
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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
Hey everyone ! Please contact us on our website and tell us how you would like to use this feature in Premiere Pro ! https://www.autokroma.com/contact
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Iain Winter commented
plz im trying to scale up pixels and they look like yak i know your thing is hIqUaLiTy but clearly there is a need for NN at least
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James Walsh commented
here to comment yet again that this is a very much needed feature
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Keith Shetler commented
Yet another game trailer editor here! Currently I have to scale in Premiere to the size I want then dynamically link the footage to AE to take advantage of NN for pixel art footage.
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Phil Strahl commented
Because this thread on the issue is seeing some attention lately, I want to toss my hat in the ring yet again. I'm working a lot with retro footage in my content production and had to resort to up-scaling with VirtualDub because of the lack of a nearest neighbor option in Premiere.
@Francis Crossman: I'm sure this had been pointed out elsewhere but it seems that you don't understnd the problem we're having: It's not about (detail-enhnacing) upscaling, it's about doubling the pixels that are in the footage explicitly *without* interpolation.
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Derek Lieu commented
Another game trailer editor here! Working on games with pixel art means frequently having to go back and forth between After Effects and Premiere; it can be laborious and troublesome especially when things don't link up well.
An option for nearest neighbor scaling in Premiere would be a game changer and make things so much easier for myself, my game trailer making colleagues and the tons of people out there making videos for their pixel art games!
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Dino Katherine commented
As a game trailer editor, I work with pixel art and this nearest-neighbor scaling would ease and speed up work a lot.
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Mjoshua cauller commented
Game trailer editor here! I work on pixel game trailers all the time where a bit of nearest neighbor on motion-scaled shots would save me hours of my life! Please add this to the next version of Premiere, Adobe. Pretty please!
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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
A complete vidéo on the topic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKV1JFE0_Nk
At that point someone should just make a plugin (:
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Jacob Scott commented
Detail Preserving Upscale and High-quality interpolation are useless when you're trying to retain the exact same image and just make it appear larger. Particularly for the sprite art I work with which originally is at maybe 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, upscaling with anything except nearest neighbour causes issues with blurriness and warping on the edges. And as far as I can see, there's no reason not to add more scaling options. It shouldn't exactly be hard, having at least a few scaling options is standard in image editing software, and should be for video editing software too.
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Dieter Reinert commented
add this already