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Field dominance question/best workflow?
Hi. I’m trying to work on a project with material that’s both lower field dominant and no field dominant. All of the graphics and music videos are lower field, and all of the HD footage shot is none. The final product is NTSC. What I’ve been doing so far is setting my sequence settings to no field dominance so that the HD footage looks best, but all of the other stuff looks sorta bad.
I’ve been scouring as many questions here as I can read about field dominance, and came across one thread that mentioned applying a field shift filter. I tried applying this filter to some of my lower field clips to see if they’d look better in my no-field sequence, but it has no effect. I know I’m doing something wrong, but so far can’t nail it. I’ll keep reading until I find something, but if someone would clue me in I’d appreciate it. Thanks.
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17 Replies
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Hi Paul,
in this case the Shift Fields doesn’t work. What you need is to de-interlace your interlaced footage. Everything will be Progressive and will work perfect in a NONE sequence. Don’t use the FC de-interlaced.
The other option is just to set your sequence to Lower first (no shift fields, no de-interlacing). The progressive footage will work OK too.
Rafael -
Hi, Rafa. (Hope you don’t mind…I’m a tennis nut) Thanks for the quick reply. I think I understand what you’re saying, but how do I go about de-interlacing all my lower field stuff without FCP? Is there another way of accomplishing this?
I’ve been messing around with setting the sequence to lower field first, but I can’t seem to make my HD stuff look clean. I’m getting lots of blurry edges, etc. (The good news is that all my lower-field stuff looks awesome!)
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Ok, I’m afraid I just annoyed you with my “Rafa” thing…sorry. Won’t happen again. If you’re not too irritated with me (I get really concerned about offending people online), I would like to ask you something else about my workflow. I’ve been reading up on how to de-interlace my stock graphics, but then came across one Cow tutorial that said that if my final product is bound for TV, I should stick with field-interlaced video. My stuff is indeed bound for cable TV, so I should set my sequence settings to lower field dominant, right? And if that’s true, I guess I need to figure out how to make my HD footage look better in my lower field timeline. Does this seem correct?
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Hi Paul,
Not annoyed at all. Everybody calls me Rafa since more than 50 years ago.
I just went to pay my Internet account. I don’t want to be the whole weekend disconnected of the world.
What I meant was no to use the FC de-interlacer. Is very bad.
Whenever you put interlaced material in a Progressive sequence you need de-interlace.
Otherwise will look horrible because the two fields are read at the same time.If you put Progressive stuff in an Interlaced sequence, no problem.
This is the faster option, because a good de-interlacing add render time.. Only expert eyes will notice that there are two kinds of footage, but this is not important at all.
No problem to send for cable-TV Upper or Lower footage.What I suggest you is that once your sequence is finished you change the codec to something better than DV. DVCPro50 or even better, PhotoJPEG 75%.
Those codecs are 422 instead of the 411/420 of DV.
PhotoJPEG 75% makes the files smaller than DV.
Cheers,
Rafa -
Good to hear back from you. I’ve tried every combination of ways to make all of my clips look good, but can’t seem to make them all happy. Here’s what I’ve got:
1080p24 footage shot from a Sony XDCAM (no field dominance…perhaps that’s redundant since it’s p?)
Music videos (lower field dominant at NTSC)
Animated graphics (also lower, NTSC)Since this is for cable, I set my timeline up for NTSC, 23.98fps. The graphics look great, with nice detail. The HD footage looks horrible. I’ve been looking high and low for a way to properly convert the HD stuff to SD.
I found one site that mentioned something about “nesting” my HD stuff within my SD sequence, but haven’t found how to do this yet. Would this help?
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Hi Paul,
Let your sequence Lower First.
Before rendering, set your sequence with any 422 codec: DV50, PhotoJPEG 75%, ProRess or 8/10b Unc.
In Sequence setting check “Render all YUV material in High Precision YUV”.
Set “Render Motion Effects: Best”.
Render a bit to see how it looks.
Rafael -
I’m trying to follow your instructions, so here’s what I did:
Set my sequence to:
720×486 frame size
NTSC aspect ratio
Lower field dominance
Frame rate of 29.97
Quicktime video setting: ProRes 422 HQ
Under “Advanced” I unchecked InterlaceWhen I drop my HD footage into this timeline, it looks horrible in my Canvas. Only when
I change my sequence to “None” field dominance does it look correct, but doing this screws up
all of my SD graphics.Cheers.
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[Paul Campbell] “720×486 frame size”
Hi Paul. In the practice I don’t know much about NTSC (I’m in Pal Land).
But why haven’t you done your sequenec standard DV: 720×480?
I know that the story 480/486 complicate the things and I really don’t know how to deal with that, but my be what is causing your problems.
rafael -
Rafa, I just played around with nesting, and I was SO close to having this thing figured out. I nested one of my HD clips as an NTSC clip (the sequence for this part was set to no field dominance). I then imported that nested clip into my other lower field dominant sequence and BOOM…they both looked great! Until…
…I dropped a small transparent animation on top of the nested clip. My nested clip suddenly became blurry again. I won’t be able to do crossfades or put animated bugs in with this happening.
Man, I’m so close I can’t stand it. I’m also wiped out, so I’m outta here. Thanks so much for hanging with me. I really appreciate your feedback. It’s been a real learning experience thus far. I’m going to get back to this when I wake up, so I hope to hear from you again! Buenos noches.
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