Moving footage in comp – fields getting off – kind of have fix – need help

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

If the footage is centred and not scaled the fields that come in will go back out the same way and look fine, if it’s nudged up or down less than a pixel you’ll get field mush, moved one pixel will effectively reverse the field order, you shouldn’t see the fields on a crt but it will look “shakey” and definitely wrong. Moving two pixels up or down and everything will be fine again, so y positions that are even are fine, odd reverse fields and decimals mush the fields. Scaling by 50% will look fine at draught but field mush at fine quality.
The best thing to do is interpret the footage with the correct field order as that will let you scale, rotate and position wherever you want and then field render if it’s ok to have fields in your output, if you frame render you won’t have fields but footage is effectively half resolution.
The y positioning thing can come in again if you really need good quality, if it’s not scaled and positioned on an odd y value you can end up rendering the interpolated second fields instead of the original field and will look a bit softer, you can fix it by nudging half a frame forward or backwards in time if you want to get tricky or just put it back on an even number, if you’re scaling or rotating it doesn’t matter.
Hopes this helps, fields can be a real head-wrecker if you think about it too hard, you have no idea how many hours of head scratching went into figuring out what I just told you, especially the interpolated field part, that one nearly had us pulling our hair out.
Glennser

[Kevin Williams]

Thank you!!!!

When I view the final in my crt monitor, your right, it’s more of a mush than a full on field shake.

I’ve been spending a ton of time with different tests as well. I think I’m going to stick with not interpreting the footage and making sure I nudge things in 2. When I interpret the footage the people’s movement looks just a tad blurry or mushy.

It’s been driving me nuts until I figured out that a nudge up or down may be the issue.

[Kevin Williams]

I think I have figured this out –

I’m not interpreting any footage in the project pane.

First I’ve placed my footage in the timeline at it’s standard spot (like option+control+f).

Then I move it to where I want it.

I then make sure that the Y coordinate of my footage is at an odd number – like when it was in it’s original spot – now my footage
looks good again when I render it out. I’m not rendering out the fields in the render settings area.

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Guess I made the mistake of thinking the centre of every comp would be an even y value (Doh!!), anyway sounds like you’ve got it down ok. What I will say is that even though the footage looks soft when you interpret it as fields it won’t look that bad if you field render, (again depending on where you place it in y it might soften up a bit if you end up rendering the interpolated fields, still it will look better than what you see in the comp window as that is basically half rez).
I usually do interpret it as fields though as it gives me the freedom to scale and place it wherever I want.
Glennser