Field Dominance

[Walter Biscardi]

If you’re working in DV-NTSC, you need to leave the field dominance to Lower Field First.

You must apply a shift fields filter to the HDV material you’re applying to the DV timeline. But with Slo Mo, the results will vary. Your best bet is to downconert the HDV material before you edit with it.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Phil Beastall]

And if I’m using DV-PAL?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Phil Beastall] “And if I’m using DV-PAL?”

Lower field First still. You can perform the same test I just did. Create a DV PAL Sequence. Look at the Sequence Settings. Field Dominance is showing up here as Lower (Even).

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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Read my Blog!

[Michael Gissing]

Phil, as Walter said, DV is lower field dominance so leave your sequence set to this. The HDV material is upper so FCP applies the shift field filter. This is fine until you slo mo where the frame blending gets all confused. To solve this problem, copy the slo mo shots into another sequence which is HDV 50i and remove the shift field filter. The slo mos should now look smooth. Experiement with frame blending if they still look jerky. Then make quicktimes of each slo mo in HDV codec (same as sequence)and drop those quicktimes back into the DV sequence. Again the shift field filter will apply but it now happens after the smooth slo mo has been done.

It is a pain and a work around but for whatever reason, FCP gets field order wrong when trying to do a slo mo on footage with the shift field filter applied.