Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) slight motion jitter…

[Michael Gissing]

What are the fields settings in the sequence? Upper, None, Lower? It should maych the source footage which I am guess is none. Also how are you monitoring the final file and on which screen(s) is jitter apparent.

The problem may be purely monitoring or fields on progressive material

[Tony Brittan]

Try exporting it by choosing export as QuickTime and use current settings – self contained. When you use QuickTime conversion you are adding a layer if compression. But really, any of those other steps could’ve been the culprit.

The other possibility is that your machine is having trouble playing back the HQ file so it’s not really “baked in” like you might think. Try playing the finished piece on a more beefy machine?

Tony Brittan
Island Shore Productions
Kill Devil Hills, NC

[Tom Pickard]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for replying on this matter,

The field dominance is on None and I can’t change it so thats right,

I tested the exported Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) file at the BFI screening theatres in London, they have a professional system, watched on a cinema size screen and saw the jitter, you can still see the jitter on macs etc… though….

Any other ideas, a lot of people say it is a frame rate problem, although we have stuck to 24fps all of the way through the edit workflow….

Tom.

[Michael Gissing]

24 or 23.98 shouldn’t be a problem anyway as FCP would just slow down the actual rate, not create any frame blending or other artifacts.

None is correct so not fields. Have you tried exporting in another codec? Plain ProRes or uncompressed in case it is something about HQ. I have read opinions from many experienced people here at the Cow that HQ in standard 1080 formats offers no improvement over 422 and that it was developed for 2K frame sizes. Pity you have FCP6 and can’t stay with 4444.

Is there a chance you can try exporting from a FCP7 system? That way you can change the sequence back to 4444 so no transcoding and also for fun export HQ and 422 and see if the problem is a trancoding problem within the ProRes codec family. Also see if you can see any difference between HQ and 422 on a big screen.

[Philip Sandiford]

The short: slipping the original “jitter free” file into a new Quicktime container and dropping the result directly onto a FCP timeline did not introduce more jitter.

I am replying because there was no follow-up for the last suggestion. I was having the same issue and had previously tried re-compressing using MPEG Streamclip and Compressor. The original did not show high levels of jitter but any attempt to import into FCP 7 or recompress showed unacceptable motion artifacts during any camera moves.

This was the first thread I found but the fix seemed too easy and did not have followup so I moved to other suggestions including downgrading Quicktime components, using an older back-up install of my OS and playing the final on another system. All showed jitter.

Recompressing (slipping the file into a Quicktime container) using Quicktime7 setting “Quicktime” and “Default settings” (which looks to be a passthrough in this case) created a new jitter free file. HOWEVER, if I allowed FCP to import the new (or original) file the jitter was re-introduced. Directly dragging the file onto a timeline set to the original ProRES 422 setting DID NOT introduce jitter.

I exported the result of my “drag and drop onto the timeline” quicktime file to a high bit rate h.264 and no new jitter was noticable.