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Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy Reverse fields when making DVD

  • Reverse fields when making DVD

    Posted by Jason Yardley on December 2, 2005 at 7:37 pm

    I have FCP 4.5, I am working in PAL, I have made a Photo-jpeg timeline, I have captured some footage from beta SP YUV using the photo-jpeg capture setting, I have also captured some DVD footage from composite input of my Deck-link Extreme card using the same capture codec, all’s fine when I edit and play back, I do know that DVD footage is Lower field, but if I have captured this material using photo jpeg does this mean the codec has correct the material on input when I captured it.
    When I go to burn a DVD on the sequences that have been captured on DV it’s jerky and it look like its in reverse field dominance.
    The work flow to make a DVD is as follows, I export my Timeline out to a DV pal 48k as a reference file then drop that into my idvd project and burn.
    As I have read this is the way to make DVD from FCP

    Sean Oneil replied 20 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Sean Oneil

    December 3, 2005 at 10:21 am

    [Dogfather] “The work flow to make a DVD is as follows, I export my Timeline out to a DV pal 48k as a reference file then drop that into my idvd project and burn.”

    I had to deal with this myself when I started using P-JPEG. The only way you can make this work is to use Compressor to create your MPEG files – and you have to export to Compressor directly from FCP. Exporting a reference or self-contained file first will not work.

    When you export to Compressor directly from FCP, FCP will tell it what the correct field dominance is. Unfortunately, there is no other alternative.

    The reason this is screwed up, I think, is because either Final Cut or Blackmagic requires NTSC video to be lower-field first (I’m in NTSC-land, the oppisite may be the case for PAL). So it captures and edits P-JPEG as lower-field first. However, according to Quicktime, P-JPEG is supposed to be an upper-field first codec and will interpret it as such if it doesn’t know any better.

    DVDs (in NTSC) are upper-filed first. So even thought it should, iDVD will not reverse the fields of Photo-JPEG because it thinks it is also upper-first.

    The only way for the QT app to know what the field dominance should be is if Final Cut is directly communicating with it. That is why exporting directly to Compressor works just fine.

    Sean

  • Jason Yardley

    December 3, 2005 at 11:29 pm

    Ok thanks for the info Sean, but a bit confused, If I am editing and capturing on a photo-jpeg time line in pal which has a upperfield dom and bring in some pal beta footage which is also upperfield dom which is fine, then go and capture some DVD footage which in Pal but has a lower field dom, and put this in the photo-jpeg timeline which is upper are you saying that the DVD footage is still lower field in the timeline? But its in a timeline thats upperfield? I have used compresser to make a mpeg2 dvd file but how do I put that file into idvd because I can’t drop that file into it, do I use another DVD burning application, would I have had this problem if I had captured eveything in Blackmagic uncompressed 8 bit.

  • Sean Oneil

    December 4, 2005 at 7:08 am

    Field dominance is different for NTSC and PAL. So I don’t know the specifics of what P-JPEG and MPEG should be.

    What I do know is that the only way I could get it to work is to export directly to Compressor.

    If iDVD (which I’ve never used) doesn’t allow you to import MPEG files, then I would suggest using DVD Studio Pro, which is what I use.

    Sean

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