DVCPRO50 24p still is interlaced

[Cromwell Karlon]

I’m completely lost as to what you guys are talking about…

What’s this pull down thing… and is he trying to get ride of the interlacing lines?

[Jeremy Garchow]

I see what is happening here. I just tried a reverse telecine of the “smallclip”. What is happening is that since you have brought it in DV50 over firewire, cinema tools can read the ancillary data and is doing an “automated” rev telecine. It seems that it is working, but it is not reconstructing the C frame very well which will give you that interlaced frame, which was explained in that document I led you to earlier. So, it’s the automated process that’s getting you. I exported your clip as an uncompressed movie and preformed the rev telecine that way (there’s more options AND you get to choose the A frame) and it came out perfect.

Jeremy

[Ryan Wyler]

WOW, that’s insane!!!

Well man, I owe you an iTunes $50 gift certificat.
Email me at: ryan ate bridgetone dought c0m
(Obfuscated for those spammer bots)

I can’t imagine how much disk space two hours of uncompressed footage will take. Would there be much degregation in quality going from DVCPRO50 -> uncompressed -> reverse telcine -> DVCPRO50 ?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ryan Wyler] “I can’t imagine how much disk space two hours of uncompressed footage will take. Would there be much degregation in quality going from DVCPRO50 -> uncompressed -> reverse telcine -> DVCPRO50?”

According to aja’s data rate calculator, 2 hours of 8 bit uncompressed footage is approx 153 Gigs. 10 bit is 202 Gigs. Don’t forget, when you then do the reverse telecine you will save about 20% of the disk space. Meaning that the 8 bit content will go down to 123 Gigs and 10 bit will put you at 163 Gigs.

Again, I ask you this, why the reverse telecine? Are you planning for a film out? Do you want to save space on a DVD? What’s up?

Do you have any capture hardware? If you do, (say an aja io or Kona 2) you can remove the pulldown on ingest, with proper setup. When you say go from DV50 to uncompressed to DV50? Do you mean going back to DV50 tape? If you digitize uncompressed from the beginning you won’t lose any quality and working in an uncompressed timeline will benefit your text and graphics, not to mention color correction.

[Ryan Wyler]

Well, I wouldn’t bother with the reverse telecine if the footage was working right. The problem is that the footage is looking TERRIBLE in 29.97. It looks jittery and gross because I’m getting two interlaced frames out of every 5 frames. I’m thinking Final Cut Pro is misinterrpreting the footage just like Cinema Tools is, so it’s doing it all wrong. So I’m guessing that once I get it to uncompressed FCP might start working better for me.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Are you watching this through an NTSC monitor? I just previewed the “smallclip” through Kona tv and it looks great!

Jeremy

[Ryan Wyler]

I’m not looking at it through an NTSC monitor from FCP, BUT frames C and D appear to look whack to me when watching burned on a DVD on an NTSC system.

[Ryan Wyler]

Ok, now the ICING of the cake..

I’m going through exporting everything to “UNCOMPRESSED 10 bit 4:2:2” and it looks great at 10bit 4:2:2, but then to save disk space I’m converting it back to DVCPRO50 using Quicktime Pro 7. In doing this the picture on the DVCPRO50 appears to be “darker” than the Uncompressed 10bit 4:2:2. I can correct it by adding a gamma adjustment filter and setting it to around 0.84 or 0.83, but this is retarded. Why would converting from DVCPRO50 -> UNCOMPRESSED 10bit 4:2:2 -> DVCPRO50 result in a gamma change?

is this a quicktime dvcpro50 encoding problem??

Thanks.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Ryan, there’s something goofy in your settings when making the DVD. It should not look bad. Your footage is obviously fine (at least the clip I looked at is) and should look great when going to DVD. As far as the gamma shift, I’m not sure. I do know that you are doing a lot of software compressing and recompressing which might result in some goofy results. What you need to do is get your hands on a capture device. This will alleviate all of your problems and put you in 24p bliss. Or, you can find out what the hell is going on when you go to make a DVD. You did say you are watching the DVD on a tv, correct? It’s going to look silly on a computer as the computer does not display interlaced material correctly so you will see a lot of fields that will look “wrong”. I consistently work with footage from the SDX900 shot at 24p Normal and edited in 29.97. We make DVDs everyday. None of them have looked bad or wrong so their must be something else that’s going on here.

Jeremy

[Ryan Wyler]

You were right… I think the first time I exported to Mpeg2 with compressor I didn’t have the “lower field” setup in the timebase in FInal Cut Pro I had “NONE”, and also I must have told compressor to compress to mpeg2 29.97 PROGRESSIVE instead of using “bottom field”. So I think that’s why it was looking so jacked up on my NTSC systems.

I ended up leaving everything in Final Cut Pro DVCPRO50 with the 24p NORMAL on a 29.97 timebase. When Exported to mpeg2, 29.97 fps, bottom field, it looks great on NTSC monitors and actually looks great on the laptop powerbook 15″ G4 laptop here. It sure was a touch lesson to learn that 24p NORMAL will never be progressive, it needs the interlacing to work. In the meantime we found a bug in compressor where it detects the wrong pulldown for 24p NORMAL DVCPRO50. I submitted a bug to apple, we’ll see if they resolve it.

Thanks all for your help, I’m a happy camper.