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Field order of rendered footage
I recently talked to Apple Support about an issue we’ve been having with our FCP systems, and I would like to hear some other’s opinions on it.
We work mostly with animations that we have rendered out of After Effects as our footage. Most of the time we render full frame, non-interlaced footage because of the render time that it saves. When this is imported into FCP, it always comes in as lower field, interlaced clips, which we then have to manually change. Other programs, such as After Effects on either mac or pc and Apple’s own Compressor will correctly identify the field interpolation, so I assume that there is some sort of flag in the Quicktime file that indicates this.
I called support to see if there was a way around this issue. They did a bunch of testing to confirm the issue, and basically said that FCP was designed that way because it was NTSC D1 sized footage which is always lower field. To me, it feels like a bug – the footage is flagged, and that flag is not being read correctly.
I asked the support person to escalate it and he said he would, but I’m curious to hear what the members of this forum think – feature or bug?
A secondary question for the more machine-roomy technical people – does a NTSC D1 suite have to be lower field? Back in the analog days, a system could be either.
BTW- we’re running FCP 6.0.1, OSX 10.4.10, dual 3 ghz Xeon, 5 gb ram.
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2 Replies
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I do understand that all NTSC footage is interlaced, that is exactly why FCP’s incorrect interpretation of our renders is a problem. If you take something that is frame rendered and interpret it as lower field, it looks aliased. When you change the clip’s properties so that the system understands that it is frame rendered, everything looks great.
“Are you talking about field ORDER, field DOMINANCE, or color framing?”
I didn’t know there was a difference between field order and dominance, but I was referring to working at different post houses, some used lower-field systems and some used upper-field systems, but all of them were NTSC. None of them were TV stations though, perhaps in the broadcast world it has to be lower field.
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You might be right about the software version, the problem did seem to start when we upgraded to FCP 6. What version of FCP are you running?
“I changed the field order from Not Set to Lower (Even).”
So when you brought your clip in, the field dominance property defaulted to “Not Set”. Ours always default to “Lower Field”, which we then have to change, and this is our problem.
Not sure why you can’t duplicate the aliasing problem, maybe it is specific to our configuration, but it is definitely seen by all six of our editors on all six of our systems.
Thanks, by the way, for all the testing you’ve done on this!
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