Kona field issue

[Brad Loflin]

Ben,

Were these cuts ‘edited’ or were some from live ‘switcher’ production? Through the years with various switchers from Sony to GVG to DD35 we have had this issue. This may not be what you are facing but for anyone else reading this maybe this applies.

Switchers can cut on any field. So you will get times when you cut on your timeline that one field is at the end of one clip and the other field is at the beginning of the other. However, most switchers do have a option or switch to force cuts on frames only which in theory eliminates the problem, assuming you have your facility setup and timed properly.

As a side note we have been going back and forth with ProRez and field dominance issues. Some of the Apple presets are Upper field first (good for you with PAL but bad for NTSC) and we ended up with a mess of problems with 6 editors all beginning to work in ProRez. Even when we think we have it all smoothed out it keeps causing problems between FCP, Compressor, DVD SP, SD/HDV footage, etc. We have actually had one show make it to air (or at least the uplink) with reversed fields… opps. Think we finally now have all working right.

Brad Loflin

[Ben Holmes]

Dear all

I have just spent the weekend on another system – recently installed on a Quad core Intel Mac Pro. A Kona LH card and BOB on a system running FCP 5. It had the latest versions of QT.

I had held off installing FCP6 after the problems I had faced above, but I was dismayed to find the same problems. If I wanted to slow a clip down to 50%, I had to de-interlace it to get rid of field judder caused by the capture/playback. Of course, these issues were not visible on the computer monitor, just on the interlaced monitor.

PLEASE, can anyone in PAL-land (as I am sure this issue is not an NTSC issue) try to duplicate this for me – just capture using the uncompressed 10-bit SD codec, and slow it to 50%. Let me know if it’s smooth – with or without field blending.

No – this is not a sequence or capture settings issue, so please my American collegues, don’t tell me it is. This is driving me crazy.

I am planning to post this as a new thread as well, to see if I can get AJA’s attention – they have not replied to my support follow-up.

Ben

[Dan Diaz]

I am also suffering a similar issue with my Kona setup.

I’m capturing a live show (PAL) and editing using the FCP Studio 2 suite. This a a project where every last frame must be QCd for security purposes. The show looks fine in FCP. It is a cuts only show and there are no issues or artifacts where the cuts are.

When we export our finished video from FCP and review frame by frame in streamclip, everywhere there was a switched cut, there are frames that look as though we caught them mid dissolve. The only solution that I have been able to find thus far has been to deinterlace the video we captured before editing. This has a noticeable impact on the quality of the image and negates our investment in nice cameras, etc.

I’ll be anxiously awaiting some resolution to this matter…

Cheers!

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would contact support@aja.com immediately.

Jeremy

[Ben Holmes]

I sincerely hope (and I say this as someone who has a great deal of respect for AJA’s support) that he has more luck than me. They have not followed up on two emails I sent them on this topic, and only replied to the first one with the usual standard responses – a fair first reply, but one I had hoped we could move on from.

I fear this may be the problem with dealing with a US company on a PAL issue. I hope someone there can prove me wrong, and actually test the PAL capture with PAL equipment. Until someone does, I am going to assume something is fundementally wrong here. At present, I cannot slow down any footage in the timeline without de-interlacing it first, or I get field judder, on top of the issue with ‘cuts’ I mentioned before. Not ideal.

Ben