Ripped DVD’s in FCP

[Sean Oneil]

[Shane Ross] “Why are you assuming that TV stations have now altered the way their air TV shows? Especially fledgling ones that are only found on cable and only air reruns? I’ll wager that the master tapes are betaSP or dubs from 1″ or 3/4″ masters. Terranex? NO way. These are just shows that are aired as they were originally mastered.”
A lot of networks use a Teranex. If the one you speak of doesn’t, then your particular plasma has a fancy deinterlacer chip in it taking care of it like a DCDI or a Realta HQV (which Terenex actually designed and is made for higher-end consumer TVs). Most TVs don’t have this and if your cable box is upconverting everything to 1080 then it’s moot anyways. Most deinterlacers can detect and remove pulldown, but if the cadence is bad then you’ll get artifacts during every time an edit had been made on a 29.97 timeline.

[Shane Ross] “what about the 80s and 90s when all this was king? Shot on film, mastered on tape. Did it look bad?”

In the 80’s and 90’s it did not. Now it does. As I already said, people only had CRT televisions back then. You cannot see field rendering on interlaced CRT displays like you can on digital LCDs & plasmas & web clips. CRTs draw the image on the screen, one line at a time for field one, then one line at a time for field two going in the opposite direction. This creates an optical illusion so that individual fields are not detected by the human eye. LCDs and plasmas work completely differently. They expose the eye to the entire frame all at once. Hence the example clip I linked you to. I see old stuff all the time on TV that look like that Hancock trailer on IMDB.

Sean

[Joseph Owens]

SMPTE 3:2 film xfred to 29.97 isn’t about extra “frames”, its about extra “fields” distributed so that 4 goes into 5 with no remainder. If film were shot at 30, we wouldn’t have this problem and every frame would be an “A” frame. But we’ve got this ABCD cadence. Where A is the first frame occupying two frames and corresponds to a real 29.97 “frame”. The next frame is a “B” which occupies 3 fields, in other words 1-and-a-half video frames. The real nasty one, the “C” frame, consists of two video fields, “straddling” the third and fourth video frames, and the “D” brings us back to “Doh” by filling the last three fields of the 10 field sequence by straddling the fourth and fifth video frames. So the only way you could get a nice de-interlaced, jitter free still would be on either video frames 1,2, or 5, since they are uniformly and interlaced A, B, or D frames. Editing on a “C” frame is the killer, because that video frame will either contain a field of the B or D frame. Now do you get where the problems might start adding up?

About 10 years ago, I got a look at one of the first plasmas, brought into a post house on spec/demo.

The sales guys asked us to put up some footage to demonstrate how fantastic the new pictures were, and… oops. First tape was a (protection clone) master of a nationally broadcast show, which jumped and showed jumbled fields at every edit. The reason? 3:2 pulldown. The show was shot super16, xfrd at 23.98 A-Frame to 29.97 and cut in 29.97, just like everything else was up until recently. So of course the cadence was totally hooped. An editor has about a 1 in five chance of getting it right, technically, but they edit for story NOT frame numbers. So it was a bit of a surprise for all concerned that what had passed an international QA was generating all this garbage. Of course the plasma could not possibly be at fault — it was brand new of course.

Generally speaking, anything shot 23.98 should be edited at 23.98 and then streamed out all in one piece so that the cadence is correct and uninterrupted throughout the media. This is only logical, from an engineering standpoint. There are other examples of flawed thinking, for example, sending out 23.98 footage on 29.97 tape “dailies” for editorial. That one just boggles my mind. Why don’t you just shoot yourself in BOTH feet?

Now that we have so many flavours of 3:2 cadence, the issues have become much more complicated, of course. Not that I am particularly fond of AP, but it is rather clever and lends itself to a very neat redundancy removal algorithm. But apps like Shake can’t deal with it because it is only able to recognize SMPTE 5:4 spread 3:2:3:2, or 2:3:2:3 if it was A-Frame. So, like all kluge fixes, you should either deal with it at the source, or prepare for pain.

jPo

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