“Ghosting” on downconverted text

[Kevin Wild]

Tim, I’m sorry to see you are having problems, but I sure am glad I wasn’t the only one experiencing these issues! I know AJA’s support is usually very good, but after I spent an hour on the phone with them, sent them pictures of what I was seeing…they had agreed there was a problem. Then, zero followup with me and it was not corrected. I don’t get why more people are not seeing this. We have 3 different configs (intel, 2 G5’s) going to 3 different monitors and all 3 show this problem. It is obviously a downconvert bug.

The good news, is there is a work around. (At least it works for us.) The secret is to export your HD sequence first and then bring it back into FCP and drop it in the SD timeline. This should fix it. Then, you just play out SD 8 bit and it looks fine. This works for us also, because we usually save an HD version for archive anyways. Basically, this is bypassing the downconvert, but it doesn’t take long to export and re-import.

Hope that helps. Let me know.

Kevin

[Francois Stark]

So why not just use the LHe… It seems kona 3’s hardware downconvert (The one feature I would use) is inferior to the export-HD-import-into-FCP-SD timeline method.

It will take a bit longer: Export ref HD movie, import, throw on SD timeline, render in SD… play out.

$1 000 cheaper, and better visual quality… No contest.

Regards
Francois

[Tim Mclaughlin]

Evidently you’ve never seen what that looks like. FCP does not do a wonderful job scaling HD to SD and then adding pulldown.

Interlacing artifacts all over. Looks worse than the ghosting.

Tim McLaughlin
Avid and Final Cut Editor

[Paul Provost]

way worse. expect major aliasing…

Paul Provost
http://www.postandbeam.tv

[Ramona Howard]

Francois,

“It seems kona 3’s hardware downconvert (The one feature I would use) is inferior to the export-HD-import-into-FCP-SD timeline method.”

What tests are you doing to show this and what is the source content because the K3 is used daily in a high-end environment with excellent results. There are many things that could be contributing to the poor look of the downconvert your doing. Remember HD and SD are very different and even the codec may be the contributing factor in your poor results.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Jason Lyons]

Just chiming in here.. I recently ran across this issue. HDV 1080i using AJA Kona 2 to downconvert. So I selected selected the correct setting in FCP Video Playback settings (AJA Kona 1080i 29.97 8bit(1920×1080). Whammmo when monitoring the down-convert titles were all ghosting. Even detail in my program was ghosting. Called AJA, they as always were extremely helpful, we replaced the Kona2 card. Same thing.

I tried, FCP Video Playback settings (AJA Kona 1080p 29.97 8bit(1920×1080). And the ghosting went away. What is up with that! ? So my options are reduced to laying out a 1080p program (which is actually interlaced) or one that has ghosted images. I chose to lay out 1080p as it was the lesser of two evils…. hmmm this reminds me of another lesser of two evils dilemma to be hashed out on Nov. 4th.