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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 (Sr. 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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  • Troy Gaming commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    please add nearest neighbour scaling to premiere pro, i really need to upscale my pixel arts properly

  • Iain Winter commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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

  • Keith Shetler commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Phil Strahl commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Derek Lieu commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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!

  • Dino Katherine commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    As a game trailer editor, I work with pixel art and this nearest-neighbor scaling would ease and speed up work a lot.

  • Mjoshua cauller commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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!

  • Jacob Scott commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Zac Hope commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Seen videos on this issue and didn't realise the difference between different scaling techniques. Having an option for nearest neighbour readily available would be handy when editing for youtube and other things.

  • Dave E commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

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

  • Dave E commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Nearest neighbor video upscale for retro gaming (nes snes genesis ps1 atari gameboy ds etc)

    ive been using premier pro for 10 years and it would be a nice feature to have select able upscaling option next to the standard video scale controls. right now premier only does bicubic scaling. nearest neighbor would allow any 2d sprite based game to to be pixel perfect instead of blurry. ive tried paid for 3rd party software plug ins but it just doesn't work. so having this feature naively would be really useful for any one making videos with old video game footage captured via emulator window. or just simply wanting to keep the pixels sharp for some project.

  • 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.

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