Interlacing question

[Sedesign]

computers scan progressive whilst TV’s are always NTSC. My guess is since your media is progressive (non-interlaced) would be you might want to check to see if you mixed up your original comps frame rate with your playback framerate. This can happen from a number of things. But that would be one of my first guesses.

[Ben G unguren]

Rob,

Are you vertically scaling your footage at all? That could be bad for interlaced footage. If you are, you should correctly interpret your footage (select the footage in your project window and press command+f) and then render to fields. In fact, maybe you should be doing this anyway.

ben

[Rob Wolf]

Thanks…that’s the direction I was looking to go. Any recommendations on the settings for rendering the fields?

R

[Ben G unguren]

You need to render whatever works (looks right) with your editing system. You can render either upper field first or lower field first. DV-based editing systems, for instance, are lower field dominant, so if you’re working in Final Cut Pro with miniDV footage, or Avid DV, or Premiere, you should render lower field first.

If you are unsure whether to render upper or lower, try this: create a composition with the NTSC-DV or NTSC-D1 preset, depending on your system (if you don’t know which one you should use, try doing both and this might help you figure that out as well). Create a quick animation of some little circles or text moving quickly across the screen (so it takes, say, two seconds to cross), over and over (a horizontal hail storm), for about 10 seconds. Render this out upper field first (label it upperFirst.mov, or upperFirstDV.mov if you’re doing DV and D1). Render it again lower field first. (You set the field order in the Render settings of your render queue. You don’t need to make any changes to the composition itself.) Import these movies into your editing program, drop them in a timeline, hook it up to a TELEVISION (not a computer monitor) and see which looks better. If you do this right, it should be extremely obvious. It may take a few attempts to get the right codecs and sizes, but that’s all a part of the fun. Good luck,
ben