-
Settings for film transfer
Hi everyone,
I’m doing some effects on a film made of archives – video archives that is – that will get a transfer to film for cinema release. The film has a couple of fx that we’re making in AE. Since it will be transfered to film, there will be a deinterlace taking place at the lab, so we’re not touching the video. Since we’re creating the effects from scratch, those can be done in a progressive way – though they’ll have to be reinterlaced in order to be inserted on the digibeta mastertape.
We’re working on Avid, at 1:1 Uncompressed resolution – which is PAL Upper Field First.
Some of the effects will include original footage, then the effect will be created, then the resulting comp will be reimported in the Avid.
How do I set AE in order to lose little quality and get a progressive render on the exported clip – whilst keeping the original footage interlaced? I know it sounds complicated, but let take an example: I create a pageturn in AE, using two shots from the film. The result I’d like is to keep the original footage virtually untouched (hence the use of 1:1 uncompression) with both its field as they were prior to export, and I’d like the effect to be progressive (over 2 fields of course), ie when I step from field 1 to field 2, I have the pageturn border exactly at the same position on the screen – and not slightly further away, halfway thru its position on the next frame.Hope I’m sort of clear, let me know if not.
Pierre -
8 Replies
-
AE can take both interlaced and progressive at the same time. It’s composition settings do not even have a “take only fields settings.” The only place where fields are, are in interpret footage command in bin and final rendering output. You may ask, what happens if I mix interlaced and non-interlaced? Well, if you have interlaced and encode to fields [OFF] then, you get a crappy deinterlaced video because AE has a bad built in deinterlacer. If you had to export fields [OFF] then get Algolith for AE because it is the only thing close to 100% original for removing scanlines. The other export option is fields [on]. Your interlaced footage wouldn’t lose any quality, but what about your progressive footage?
Well AE does have a built in re-interlacer. It simply puts each field half the time a frame is shown. There’s other field re-interlacers such as fieldskit re-interlacer that supports more options such as:
Half Frame Rate 59.95p to 29.94i
Keep Frame Rate destination 1/2 duration
Field Blending mix fields but you can’t undo it later on.Hope this helps. Keep us apprised and good luck on your project.
-
Thanks Keith,
Thing is, I don’t want to de-interlace in AE, but I want the non-interlaced footage to stay that way. For instance, I have a Tif file in my comp, and I “zoom” into it, then it moves sideways to reveal a Quicktime (interlaced) underneath. The Quicktime is interpreted as “Off”, the rendering is to “Upper field first” and what happens is that AE gives me 50 fields per second. That’s logical. But when I’ll transfer back to film, it will look like this:
https://cineaste.dyndns.org/~pierrehab/AE_test/Pageturn.png
Where what I want is each field to be identical – when it was originally a graphics. Should I use Fieldskit or something similar and deinterlace nicely everything first?
I can’t seem to find a solution. -
I believe you’re looking for this one. To combine fielded and non-fielded footage.
fieldskit re-interlacer
• = Create motion estimated fields: This option will convert progressive material to interlaced material using motion estimation to create new fields between each original frame. This mode looks at the current frame and the next frame and estimates a new field at the inbetween position. https://www.revisionfx.com/products/fieldskit/downloads/
If you are re-interlacing back onto a digibeta mastertape, then it will take care of the fields anyway. You’re just looking at a quicktime movie with field separating so you see lines. Just output fields [on] and digibeta will have to worry about turning its NTSC fields back into 35mm film. It will have to anyway, for the quicktime interlaced footage. Think about it. And use a crazy high quality codec output because digibeta is 10-bit 90 Mbit/s. Use something like at least dvc pro 50 codec 32 bpc to maintain quality. DVCPRO100(HD) at 100 mbps is preferred. Just think, you’re even higher than the digibeta output by 10 mbps!
-
Honestly, if you’re delivering to a film transfer lab you would probably be better off delivering an image sequence on hard drive rather than a digibeta. First and foremost using an image sequence will allow you to deliver a much higher resolution than is possible on your digibeta. Of course if you’re using a lot of SD video footage to begin with you don’t have much resolution to work with in the first place.
If things are too far along and you have no other options then it’s safe to assume that the film lab will be doing most of the work to make sure that your video looks good on film and all you should be concerned with is making sure that your video looks good.
A note: if you properly interpret your video footage in AE it will appear to be de-interlaced, but if you render back out to an interlaced video you’ll find that the interlacing is preserved. Basically, you should probably not set your fields interpretation to ‘off.’
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
if they were going for perfect quality, they would have received film transfer to cineon and worked with its own color management and pro res effects separately added together on optical printer.
-
Yeah, I kind of assumed that they were ok with just video to film, which is why I figured the film lab would be doing most of the work in making sure that the video looks ‘good’ on film.
So: make sure that the video looks good and don’t even think about it going to film.
Also, make sure that you understand what the film lab is expecting from you and what they will be doing for you.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
The idea behind delivering on Digibeta is because the Aarilaser transfer has its own way of upscaling images from 720 wide to 1900 (roughly). And it does the deinterlacing during the process.
Now maybe it’s possible that fieldskit – which I’m about to test – does a better job. In that case yes it would make sense to give the lab a sequence of images. I’ll find out today, I’ll call the lab. -
Well, since you are using low quality anyway, you could always try fieldskit demo and instant hd to upscale but, for real quality – fieldskit is nothing compared to Algolith MADI deinterlacer. Algolith is almost 100% original. It could do deinterlace and upscale “720 wide to 1900 (roughly)”
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up