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Cleaning up footage?
Here is the situation: I have been hired to ‘clean up’ a feature length movie. It was shot and posted on HD. When it was authored/burned to DVD the compression was somehow botched and it gave the entire movie a certain ‘feel’ in the look to it. The best way I can describe it is a flutter-like look, in that the footage looks as if has missing frames, but has been blended back together. Think of it like when you see a re-enactment on a TV show where something bad happened, so they add appropriate effects (strobe) to give the feeling of dis-orientation. Or it can also be comprable to looking like the whole movie is seen by somebody on drugs. This look and feel are most obvious on fast camera moves and when the actors move around alot.
The obvious solution is to just re-author the DVD or export to tape? Well for whatever reasons, that is no longer an option. I have to work with the DVD that I have. So do you have any suggestions on how I might go about counter acting this effect? My only idea is to maybe try some further frame-blending to see if it might help. I am not going to start work on it for a few more weeks, but I would like to prepare now. Any in-sight into the situation would be much appreciated.
Thank you
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4 Replies
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You ONLY have that bad DVD to work with? That isn’t good. I don’t think there is much you can do…
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It sounds like one of two things:
The DVD was authored with the fields reversed. This would give you the jittery motion, especially when there is a great deal of movement. The fix for this would be to extract the video (use DVDxDV) and bring it into FCP. You could then either reverse the fields ot nudge it down one pixel and re-encode it.
The other possibility is more gruesome. They may have tried to give the video some sort of “film look” and improperly blended the frames. If this is the case, It might well be impossible to extract clean footage from it.
Doesn’t it seem odd to you that the producers that hired you to do this job no longer have access to the master? Just be careful is all I’m saying.
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Yeah, the whole thing smells fishy. My guess is that the producers had a falling out with the original post house and this is the only version they got their hands on.
Thanks for the advice. I really hope it is just an easy fix like reversing the fields.
Thanks for the advice. -
[Betawave] “My guess is that the producers had a falling out with the original post house and this is the only version they got their hands on.”
Are you sure that they are really the producers? Do they really have rights to the film? It’s unusual that they would have no access to the edit masters or the original source material.
Can you find out who posted the film & authored the disk in question? If you can you should find out if they even got paid for the work that they did. Find that out before you spend any actual time working on the project.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com
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