Interpreting PAL/DV/25i fields correctly

[Darren Edwards]

I understand Dave, but we’re talking about uncompressed DVAVI
footage being bumped back and forth Premiere and After Effects.
It makes a mockery of Adobe’s so-called seemless workflow,
don’t you think?

Darren.

x-gf.com

[Darren Edwards]

Dave, I’ve used AE, Magic Bullet, Sapphire, blabla to grade, pulldown
everything from digitized Super-8 to 4.4.4 HD, over the years; the nub
I’m trying to get too is, as I’ve only experienced this bizarre field
issue with PAL 25fps/interlaced footage on a Premiere Pro/After Effects
workstation, is it an issue localised to this format, that’s all. Maybe
fellow UK-based editors have experienced it too?

Darren.

x-gf.com

[Darren Edwards]

Dave,

Apology accepted. Sadly, I’m now old enough to say that ‘I’ve been around
for a while’ in this business. – The BBCi channel I was head of production for
a year even won a RTS (Royal Television Society) award (Innovative Idea of
the Year 2005), although, none of my team were invited to the ceremony.
The swines.

Anyhoots, what I mean by ‘uncompressed’ DV is a local term I/we use for DVCAM
rushes on the timeline which hasn’t been affected in any way, that’s all. It
kind of keeps things simplified if the final product ends up transcoded into
a million different formats.

Experimenting with AE’s field interpretation settings did affect things slightly.
The field defaults in AE and PPro (in PAL projects in the UK, at least) are matched
anyway, so when I first started using our PPro/AE workstation a few years ago
I didn’t notice the lines at first, because I wasn’t expecting to see them
there. It was only when we upgraded AE and PPro with Magic Bullet, graded a
project (pop video) with some dark greens in PPro, that they were spotted…
Then this ‘oh shit’ panic of: ‘How many projects have left the building
with these noticable lines on them?’ kick in.

(Reluctantly) deinterlacing helps, but not much. Twiddling with the interp settings
within PPro and AE worked, then didn’t, once motion graphics and/or plugins were
introduced. I probably need to poke a tech guy over at the Adobe forums, really, but I’m
usually too busy, and more fortunately, interlaced DVCAM projects now amount
to about 10% of what we do; it’s just one of those bugs I’d like sorted on
principle more than anything else.

We’ve upgraded the PC suite with PPro2 and AE7 but the plugins haven’t been
installed in them yet so they haven’t been used.

Thanks again, though, for your repeated attempts to help.

Darren.

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