Odd Vertical Interlacing-ish footage

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not convinced its an interlace or field-order problem, exactly. Motion footage would make the trouble clearer. But I think what you have there may be an RF problem, probably made during a transfer step. Unterminated sources can cause something like this. Is the problem visible in direct output of the original raw tape or master they gave you, from a DVC Pro 25 deck? You checked your monitors with known-good footage too, yes?

You may also have introduced a problem when you transcoded to get your wide screen anamorphic back, usually you just highlight the clip, and check or uncheck a box in its properties box, not re-encode or transcode.

I’m not sure of anything here, just throwing darts at the wall to see if any will stick. You might try re-importing two minutes’ worth of the original and having FCP tell you what codec to use.

[Grant Strac]

Ok thank you I appreciate the insight. Thats exactly what I thought this production place does what they can but I was quite sure that the import of the tapes was the problem. I will request the tapes and do it myself, thanks. I tried doing the option to make it anamorphic and it looked the same the transcode was just a hope to maybe gain quality. Like you I was just throwing darts hoping to hit. Your probably right I figured that if it where fixable by any way possible it was probably on the capture.

Thanks again!

[Grant Strac]

I’m pretty sure that’s the problem I bet it wasnt captured with dvcpro. I didn’t think of that so thank you!

[Michael Gissing]

DV codecs in PAL are lower field. Also SD is always 4:3 and 16:9 is done via anamorphic squeeze. If the anamorphic flag isn’t properly set, then FCP displays it wrong. So set the flag manually in the browser before editing.

Shift fields filter is built into FCP so apply that to those clips.

[Bret Williams]

On the blinds? The vertical sorta lines? That’s banding. The image you’re showing is highly compressed. The compression used was not enough to deal with the gradients on the blinds. This doens’t look lik original looking DV25 footage.

A couple things you say are bizarre…

[Grant Strac] “They gave it to me in 4:3 dvcpro and it was filmed in 16:9. I re-compressed the footage into pro res 422 16:9 and fixed that problem.”

16:9 SD footage is 4:3. 720×480. There is no reason or need to recompress, you simply tell FCP it’s anamorphic by checking the anamorphic box in the bin. Then it will distort properly when placed in your 16:9 sequence.

[Grant Strac] ” I then took it to motion so it was vectored and ran some filters that way.”

What does that mean? You can’t make footage vector based by taking it into motion. You can’t make it vector based at all.

[Michael Gissing]

25 frame is 720 x 576. If the problem is chroma banding then a chroma smoothing plugin like the Mattress filters can help.

[Grant Strac]

Well although I appreciate the insight I have fixed my problem.

[Grant Strac]

Thank you Michael the source capture was the issue. I only re-compressed (for everyone else to know) to see if I could get more out of pro res rather than dvc pro. It was filmed in dvc pro and it was not captured in that format.

I realize the anamorphic flagging I only wanted to throw some darts at the wall because I was at a loss to the quality. I put it into motion because Motion turns everything vectored immediately as it’s put into the program which allows a little better image manipulation.

[Bret Williams]

[Grant Strac] “I put it into motion because Motion turns everything vectored immediately as it’s put into the program which allows a little better image manipulation.”

Seriously, what the heck are you talking about? It does no such thing. Do you know what vector means?