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.
TaranVH
shared this idea
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.
35 comments
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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
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
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Zac Hope
commented
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.
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Royce Whitaker
commented
Watch this video adobe. Lots of persuasive reasons to add this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUCc5NGEthA -
Dave E
commented
@Antoine Autokroma that plugin is useless. i own it. it crashes constantly when in use.
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Antoine Autokroma
commented
There is GPUResize for AEfx and PPro https://aescripts.com/gpuresize/
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Jeremy Smolik
commented
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 :)
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TaranVH
commented
***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/sfw3i2NTo 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
@TaranVH That is true and speeds up my workflow at least a little bit until this gets implemented *nudge nudge* ;)
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TaranVH
commented
@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
@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 :)
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TaranVH
commented
@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
