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Fields found in 24P
I’ve searched the posts, but nothing clarified the situation. I shot some 24P footage in DVCPRO50 and had it captured last summer. I wish I had done it myself. In any case, I haven’t looked at it until now. Personal project. Last night, I imported the files with a friend of mine who works in the milieu. AE read and played them at 23.98 frames and uncovered a rich display of fields. My friend said “Call and complain!” Eight months after the fact, that hardly seems fair or justifiable.
Every shot is greenscreen, to be composited with plates rendered out of Maya. I’d very much like to turn this mess into 24 fps. There’s no amount of elbow grease I won’t put into it. Heck, I’d do it in Photoshop if I knew where to start.
Question: Where do I start?
– SGM
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22 Replies
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[Dave LaRonde] “I would STRONGLY recommend that you start the capture process from scratch.”
But-but-but… Damn. What about Twixtor and FieldsKit? Any hope in that? I do have the original tapes, but my budget is maxed out.
What if I leave the fields in? To what extent would these fields interfere with keying and compositing? Say I’m not planing on a film print down the line.
Come to think of it, I doubt you can add fields when rendering out of maya.
By the way, all 30-minute tapes were, in fact, captured as single files. You’re dead on.
That stuff about the camera resetting at every shot is rather interesting. I’m glad you mentioned it.
But please do comment on the Twixtor option.
Thanks – S.
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you said you shot the footage, right… i hope you still have the tapes. i think dave’s right, recapture. recapture each clip separately and export each separately.
you can have your nle remove the pulldown and often the duplicate frames associated with removing the pulldown. or you can just bring the clip into ae and have it remove the pulldown (ae usually guesses the correct pulldown, if the pulldown is consitent, ie. the interlaced 24p hadn’t been editted, as dave described). you can also determine the cadence by looking at the first 5 frames, and the order of interlaced and progressive frames, and set that in the pulldown setting of interpret footage in ae (ie swwws, etc).
i think that if ae is automaticly interpretting the file as 23.98 fps, then you’ll need to recapture from dv… you may be able to save portions of the clip if it had been editted, like dave said, 1 in 5 chance that the pulldown was correct, so 1 out of 5 edits may be ok.
the only thing that could save you is if the footage is really 29.97, and ae is interpretting the footage at 23.98 with an incorrect pulldown.
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i was giving my 2 cents as your were replying…
but in response to keying, one of the big problems you’ll encounter is when you choke your key. choking will tighten your key in all direction, not just horizontally, and will generally choke away your feilds on the edges of what you are keying and effect the smoothness of motion of that clip.
you will mostlikely have problems later, when you edit and print to video. when you go back to video, you will need to go back to 29.97… and your incorrectly interpretted or exported footage will give you even more grief, especially if you edit it with other 24p footage. at that point, much of what you’ve done probably won’t be usable, and you’ll be going back an recapturing your original greens.
since you have the tapes, it would try to talk to the guys who captured you footage, and see if you could work something out… if you told them there were problems with their conversion to 24p and asked that a straight capture of your footage in 29.97, single clip, that you’ll split and convert (or interpret in ae) to 24p, they may give you a break.
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[Dave LaRonde] “Either through lack of knowledge or laziness, you did this to yourself.”
Disgruntled editor. Well, I DO sympathize (respectfully). While I appreciate the lecture (sorta) the fact is it’s more complicated than that. Financing got pulled immediately after the shoot so my producer and I couldn’t afford a qualified editor. My background is 16-35mm. Years of it. Dues paid in full.
Thanks for the help though. What’s interesting is that some of the shots, not all, appear deinterlaced in Premiere Pro. That same shot in AE will NOT appear deinterlaced.
Talk about going back to school.
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Right. So then, the 24P camera shot at 29.97. Bringing it down to 24 is done at capture time, or at NLE time. By capturing at 29.97, your capture the tape faithfully.
Maybe I should move this stuff to the AE Basics forum instead.
If only it were as simple as recapturing the selected takes. You see, the files were too big to import, so I used an AVI splitter. Time code is different now. The fun never ends.
Thanks – SGM
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that is interesting… it may be that your clips are 29.97, and are being interpretted within the software as 23.98, and each piece of software is guessing a different pulldown cadence. try going to a problem frame (one where fields are visible) in ae. then go to the interpret footage panel for your clip and change the pulldown (ie. sswww, swwws, etc). try a few, do any remove the fields?
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we seem to have bad timing with our replies…
24p is recorded to dv tape as 29.97 interlaced via a pulldown. the pulldown can then be removed at capture, or within your software (ae, premiere, etc) after capture. then, of course, back to 29.97 for video (well, tape… you could create a progress dvd).
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The frame rate of all my files (as read by both AE and PP) is 23.98. Nonetheless, I tried to interpret it as 29.97, no good. To access the pulldown, I had to choose lower field first (which looks perfect, of course.) In any case I tried each pulldown variation and none of them removed the field.
There you have it. I’d still ike to try Twixtor, though. All the reviews are positive, and I have access to it though a friend. I’m just worried about what the interpolation would look like.
Here’s a question: Mr. LaRonde suggested I screen it on a good broadcast monitor (I hear that a lot.) Is this meant to imply that my footage may actually be fine? That a braodcast monitor would NOT show fields in the luckiest of circumstances? What would a broadcast monitor tell me that AE doesn’t already, as far as interlacing is concerned? Keep in mind, I’ve tried every interpretation setting possible in AE. What am I missing?
– SGM
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you can see fields on your computer screen, but you computer screen draws them progressively, they don’t split an image into fields to draw the image. so you won’t see how badly your footage may play bcak on tv (note: ae ram previews are progressive not interlaced, so you will most likely want to try playing footage in premiere).
if your destination is progressive, then you’ll have to remove the fields. especially if your desitantion is something like a progessive dvd, where most people (who don’t have progressive tvs) will by viewing your supposedly progressive movie, interpretted with a pulldown to interlaced… but you ‘propgressive’ was actually interlaced, and some pretty bad things would result.
i think dave’s reactions are the result of editors dumping this kind of stuff on him or his department and saying i need some effects and fix this weird problem we have with playback. it sucks when that happens, because its a lot of work to resplit a promo up into individual clips, determine the pulldown of each, select the correct pulldown for interpretation and bring those clips back in and reassemble them just so you can add some effects and rener it out correctly. at least you don’t hae true 29.97 footage cut into imporperly handled 24p, then its a whole lot of work to produce barely acceptable results.
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I follow. Good god I follow. So far.
Say my destination is 29.97, my only problem remains choking mattes in AE. That part I get. Or do I?
I actually do sympathize with the frustration editors go through. They’ve been privately cursing directors for over a century now. The good news is, as a director, I’m actually going through this hell myslef. That means the next I shoot digital, you can bet no editor will curse MY name. This is a dream opportunity for you. You get to mold a director into any shape you wish!
I just called the capture lab. They’ll see what they can do about cutting me a deal. This has been very, very, very edifying.
Regards – S.
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