field question

[Michael Sacci]

You have to be viewing the FCP timeline on an external CRT monitor to check field order.

When you have that set up you can play through the clips and add a shift fields filter on the clips that are giving you a problem. Which should be the Upper first if you are in NTSCland.

[Ian Haig]

thanks for reply,
yes I am viewing everything on an external CRT monitor, the frustrating thing is, the mixed fields FCP project plays back fine…its once I try and turn everything into lower fields (i am DVPAL) that I get weird things happening, would changing the settings in my project to NO fields re render the while thing as DV pal, solve this ? as I guess once I make a dv PAL movie it will be lower fields
ian

[Michael Gissing]

In PAL everything except DV is upper fields. You need to choose what your sequence is going to be and as has already been said, add the shift fields filter to the shots that differ from your sequence.

I would recommend making a sequence in 10 bit uncompressed if your drives are fast enough and copy your edit sequence into that. All the DV shots then need to have a shift fields filter applied and all the other material has no shift field filter.

That should then play correctly. From there if you are playing out to digi beta then that is also upper as are PAL DVDs. The advantage of making the final sequence uncompressed 10 bit is also your titles and graphics will look much better than DV codec would allow. My golden rule for PAL is to avoid DV codec at all times.

[Ian Haig]

I have tried a test with this, made a new sequence uncompressed 10 bit (upper fields) copied my sequence into this put a shift fields filter on the DV PAL footage to lower however on playback the DV footage on CRT monitor now looks stuttery…am I missing something here ?
thanks

[Michael Gissing]

Check the clips to make sure there is just the one shift fields filter on the DV footage. Sometime FCP tries to be helpful and automatically apply the shift fields filter.

[Ian Haig]

I am using only the one shift fields filter. and still looks bad on playback

if I set all fields to lower in the item properties in FCP the playback looks fine for all my footage, is changing the field dominance in item properties really shifting the fields ? as it doesn’t want to be rendered after doing this ?

I don’t have a problem so much with DVPAL as you know what you are getting, can I have a DVPAL project with footage that has lower fields, upper and NONE, will this cause problems going out to digi betacam ? or will be work around above solve this ?

thanks

[Michael Gissing]

Don’t change the field settings in the item properties. I am not sure what yo8u are doing but the golden rule is to have all PAL sequences as upper except DV. All PAL sources should also be upper field except DV source material.

So if everything is correctly set and the shift field filter only applied to the DV footage, then there should be no interlace issues. The only outstanding problem might be caused by DV clips that are sped up or slowed down. That is another issue with a work around of making new quicktime files of those shots, baking in the speed changes.

[Michael Sacci]

Before you use a uncompressed upper sequence, are you having to do out to DV because you don’t have a digibeta deck and you have the DV dubbed to Digibeta somewhere else?