Frustrated! Poor quality of SD footage in FCP 10.4

[Gary Huff]

[Rob Postroz] “The camera I shot the footage on was a canon xl1.”

The XL1 had a “Frame Mode” that was, frankly, not the best way to film on that camera. It was a workaround “de-interlacing” in camera (as opposed to the DVX100 which would give you an actual 29.97 progressive) that caused a resolution loss of around 25%, which I’m sure you’re already aware. However, the footage is still interlaced, not actually progressive. It’s simply trying to emulate the look of progressive within interlaced (as kooky as that sounds).

[Rob Postroz]I recall many years ago when working in an older version of FCP that these lines would appear when editing this type of footage, but the solution just seemed to be to check a box in the viewer (like view in highest quality or something).

Have you tried doing this in FCPX? There are similar options. I would also render out a section and see if it still looks the same.

[Joe Marler]

[Gary Huff] “I would also render out a section and see if it still looks the same.”

This is an important point. Never trust solely what you’re looking at in the Viewer. Also with Quicktime Player you cannot control whether playback deinterlacing is applied. Sometimes it reads the metadata and applies it, sometimes not. If there is suspicion about “baked in” deinterlacing or metadata, you never know what the player is showing you.

With VLC you can at least manually turn interlacing on/off and apply different deinterlacing algorithms, then compare that to how FCPX shows it and to the metadata shown by various utilities.

The XL1 is a mini-DV camera so *something* previously captured the tape to a file. My old DVX100 files are AVI captured by Premiere CS4 and (for 4:3 29.97 interlaced material), and that metadata shows DVCPRO, interlaced, bottom field first.

I wonder how the XL1 material was originally captured and whether the media file is the captured file or some intermediate format.

[Mark Smith]

Also keep in mind that even if you had a 24 frame progressive (well 23.98 ) setting on the camera there was no such thing as 24 frame video recording so pull down would be applied to bump the frame rate up to 29.97 and there will be interlaced frames in those pulldown frames. So yes there would still be interlaced artifacts in the pulldown frames.

[Rob Postroz]

Hi Joe,
Thanks for responding. Yes, the camera that I used to shoot the footage was an old canon xl1 – I’m not sure why that other camera name is listed in the inspector, although when looking at the MediaInfo profile below, it lists Canon Vixia in there as well…
Thanks for the suggestion of those programs. I downloaded MediaInfo and ran it on one of the clips. Please see below info results in the categories you requested (I couldn’t find the FORMAT settings CABAC, GOP, Reframes listed):

Format : DV
Codec ID : dvc
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 24.4 Mb/s
Format profile : QuickTime
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Scan type : Interlaced
Scan type, store method : Interleaved fields
Scan order : Bottom Field First

Below is the full screenshot of the info in case I missed anything:

[Rob Postroz]

Hi Gary,
I wasn’t aware at the time that there was a 25% loss in quality – I shot this footage almost 15 years ago and the “frame mode” looked so cool I didn’t bother to check if there was any quality loss. bummer. By any chance is there a way to get that 25% quality back through some third party software?
Re: changing some options in the viewer, I did try the “show both fields selection in the viewer” that Brett suggested and this helped a lot, but I still noticed some subtle interlacing lines when compared to the raw footage viewed in Quicktime. Is there any other options I should try?
Thanks again for the help!

[Joe Marler]

[Rob Postroz] “I did try the “show both fields selection in the viewer” that Brett suggested and this helped a lot, but I still noticed some subtle interlacing lines when compared to the raw footage viewed in Quicktime. Is there any other options I should try?”

If you can upload a (hopefully small) piece of the original material I’d be happy to look at it using various NLEs and methods. In the tape days, entire tapes were typically captured to a huge file so you may not have a small file, and uploading a rendered output doesn’t help, since the question is how the original captured material behaves. But if you have a piece that’s less than 1GB I’ll look at it.

Normal interlaced DV material is intended to be encoded as interlaced, and the playback chain will deinterlace. So if you play a captured DV file in VLC with deinterlacing turned off, it will show comb artifacts.

In the NLE era you have the option to hard deinterlace it or (for web providers like Youtube) let them deinterlace it during the post-upload encoding. The question is what does the XL1 “Frame Mode” do to the material and metadata, and how does Youtube, FCPX, Premiere Pro or Resolve (which weren’t invented when the XL1 was sold from 1997-2001) handle that material.

[Rob Postroz]

Hi Joe,
Thanks so much for offering to take a look at a small piece of footage! I have a clip 6 seconds long, 22 mb that I’ve attached:
12923_21474836471106060000.mov.zip
One final thing I discovered yesterday which may be affecting things: to capture the footage into FCP, I used the tape deck from a different Canon camera – that’s why the camera listed in the inspector is from a Canon Vixia not Canon XL1. Not sure how this affects everything within the settings, but the two cameras are totally different, so maybe that’s what’s causing the issues.
Please let me know if you need anything else.
Thanks!
Rob

[Joe Marler]

OK I looked at the material. As your MediaInfo indicates, it is DV 720×480, 29.97i, interlaced bottom field first. I see on the horizontal blinds some aliasing depending on whether I play the clip in VLC, Quicktime, FCPX, and what deinterlacing is used.

Create a manual 720p 29.97 project (File>New>Project>Use Custom Settings, pick 720p HD 29.97p), add a clip to that, then set the deinterlace checkbox for that clip. Then render it out and inspect it vs the original clip. I tried several things and that seemed to give the best quality.

Traditionally you edit interlaced material in an interlaced project and export it as interlaced since the original intent was the playback chain (DVD, TV, etc) would deinterlace. However nowadays most content is progressive so you are normally editing small pieces of interlaced archival material in a progressive timeline. In such cases the project itself is progressive so the interlaced clips should be deinterlaced.

Premiere Pro allows deinterlacing the clip then exporting it as interlaced which doesn’t seem correct — the “interlaced” metadata flag should indicate interlaced material.

In testing other vintage interlaced material on FCPX 10.4.4, I noticed it sometimes does not identify the field dominance correctly. It’s probably a good idea to check this in MediaInfo then check in Inspector Settings and make sure field dominance is set correctly.

I think there was a behavioral change between FCPX 10.3.4 and 10.4 about how the deinterlace checkbox is implemented but I no longer have that version and can’t test it.

[Rob Postroz]

Joe, thank you so much for taking the time to test this! Really means a lot. I will try what you suggest in FCP – sounds like that’s the best fix.
Thanks again,
Rob