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scaling, interlace & motion filtering LONG POST
High all,
I wanted to start a discussion about final cuts scaling, handling of interlaced video, de-interlacing and motion filtering quality.
Apple says that the “motion filtering quality”/ “best” setting, in the “sequence settings” window, will produce the highest quality rendered result. Some people have the opposite experience when converting 1080 HDV to SD for DVD. https://www3.telus.net/bonsai/Step-by-Step.html So which setting actually yields the best looking results, and if its fastest (linear), why would Apple mislead people by naming them this way?
My negative experience was a year and a half ago with 1080i footage from a Sony FX1 for a film school project. The project had to be handed in on DVD or DV tape. We exported a self contained QT Movie from the HDV 1080i timeline and compressed it with compressors DVD Best Quality setting. The results were terrifyingly ugly with interlace artifacts and resolution that would make you think the footage was shot on a cell phone camera. We experimented with exporting from a SD timeline, De-interlacing in HD & SD, upper and lower field dominance in compressor, all 3 motion filtering settings in FCP and changing the sequence to almost every codec in FCP 5’s arsenal before export. Everything yielded poor results.
The only conclusion I could come to, was that FCP just plain handled the footage from that camera wrong. Our instructor encoded some 24f HDV footage from a Canon XL H1 using our 1st attempted method and it looked 100% better. We brought him our 1080i HDV QT Movie(which looked great in HD) on a data DVD and he compressed it to DVD on his machine. It looked the same as ours, hideous. Since then we have not shot any HDV with the FX1 for SD delivery and I now own a Canon XH A1 but have not tested any 1080 60i HDV from it. Is FCP retarded when it comes to down-scaling or de-interlacing interlaced footage?
I recently found the site from which I posted the link above. I have not tested the “Bonsai Method”. It seems like a lot of hoops to jump though, when in my opinion, FCP should do what it says it does, and if it cant do it well, it shouldn’t say it can do it at all. I know no software is perfect. They are all a work in progress but we shouldn’t have to learn everything by trial and ERROR.
I recently had the same effect from scaling down some DV footage for a motion menu in DVDSP.
I would like to hear if anyone else has experienced FCPs short-commings in this area. Do Adobe and Avid handle these simple but important tasks better than FCP?
I welcome any and all comments. If I am just stupid please teach me why.
Thanks to all who reply.
Shiloh
P.S. Sorry about the length of this post.
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2 Replies
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I’ve found the same problem with 720p30 HDV footage.
I need to move my HDV shots to an NTSC timeline to continue working with NTSC footage that will also be used. When the HDV is dropped into an NTSC timeline (any codec) and letterboxed, the interlacing applied causes the footage to fall apart with aliasing. Be aware, that unless you’ve seen how the footage SHOULD look, some people may just assume it’s OK and the best they can get.
For these shots, both fields should be the same, coming from a progressive clip. But the fields are somehow getting split, with motion filtering or sequence settings, improperly.
I found that if I set interlacing in the NTSC sequence to “NONE”, then the 720p30 shots look fine – as they should in a progressive timeline. When set to lower field, to mix with the other 720×486 shots, the HDV’s images edges all go aliased. Motion filtering setting does seem to have an effect and fastest linear is the best looking, but not as good as when interlacing is turned off.
But, I can’t do that because I am using interlaced NTSC shots too. They go to crap when interlacing is turned off. So, the only method that works is to export every HDV shot to NTSC via QT or use media manager to batch convert each HDV shot to NTSC before editing in the NTSC sequence. That also works. The resulting clips now mix with the NTSC video and don’t look aliased.
Something with FCPro’s field interlacing is not working with these scaled down clips from HDV source. I suggest those of us with this issue send feedback to Apple to get them to address our problem.
Dave Beaty
Dave Beaty
Dreamtime Entertainment
1625 SE 46th St
Cape Coral FL 33904
239-549-4081
800-446-7575
dave@dreamtimeentertainment.com
http://www.dreamtimeentertainment.com -
Thanks Dave.
Its nice to know I’m not the only one. I did get good results from export using quictime conversion to 30p NTSC with deinterlace source checked. When I get time, I am going to do some tests with nattress standards conversion. I just wish that apple would be more honest about what can and can’t be expected with the current state of their software, then I wouldn’t have to spend all my time playing junior scientist and testing my results after I’ve shot something and am trying to meet a deadline.
Shiloh
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