shake newbie asks, is this workflow correct?

[Rafael Amador]

Charlott,
If you are going to Shake only for the de-interlacing, you better buy Nattress, Boris or ReelSmart Fields Kit.
Shake make very good de-interlacing (the plug-ins that we just quoted too) but your bringing your YCrCB footage to the RGB world and back.Try to avoid that a long as you can.
If your footage is “Upper” set it in “Upper”. If you are not sure of the field order, in Shake you can check it very easy. In the bottom of your Shake window you got an small box it’s wrote “Inc”. Normalli ther is a “1” in the box. Type “0.5” so whenever you hit the space bar the clip instead of moving one frame, moves one field. I’f you have set the field order wrong you will see in the viewer that there is something wrong. One field advance and the other junp-back. Choose some images with movement so you can detect easier if wrong or right.
About the proxis I can not helps you. I’ve always worked with the BASE.
Hope this helps.
cheers,
rafael

[Magda Fernandez]

Hi Rafael,

Well, the reason I’m deinterlacing is because I need to composite a bunch of green-screen footage in Shake, and my understanding is that it’s best to deinterlace first (in order to render my composites properly) and then reinterlace when FilingOut to FCP. Please advise me if I’m wrong. Ultimately I want a “video” look as opposed to a “film” look. Since I need to work in Shake anyway, should I deinterlace with SFileIn in Shake, or Nattress (in FCP)? Which option is the least lossy?

As for working in Base, when I tried that Shake crashed. It doesn’t crash, however, when I work with the proxy I describe (see my 1st post). Something in my settings is not right, however, because my Viewer Node is not dynamic. It remains frozen in the 1st frame, even though the Time bar at the bottom moves, and with .5 in the Increments box and “Upper” in Input Frame Dominance.

In case the problem lies with my hardware setup, here’s what I’m using: Apple McPro Desktop. Processor: 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon. Memory: 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM. Seagate 300 GB external hard drive.

Please keep the questions coming! Perhaps I’m not describing the problem properly or leaving something important out. But I’m determined to make this work somehow. Yeah, I’m a newbie…

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Sweet Charlotte,
The truth is that in the source tab they shouldn’t write “deinterlace”. In fact what you do there is just to set the proper field order. If you set deinterlacing here you are not getting a progresive image.Is the same that you get in AE with “Interprete Footage”, just to make understand the application what kind of footage you are importing.
That is what you get in FC with Nattress or other deintelacer plugin is a progresive image. In Shake you do it with the “Remap”, “Convert” or the “Deinterlacing node”.
But you don need a progresive picture, so you are doing right. Set the field rder of your footage in the source tab, and the order of the output movie in the Global>Render control.But you should have a look at your system or configuration because you shouldn’t have problems in working with the BASE film, and to play (slow but plays) your movie in the viewer. I’ve got a G5 2x2Gb (three years old already) with 4Gb RAM and works fine with BASE (normally I send to Shake 10b Unc) and can play slowly in the viwer.
I do not work to often with Shake and I have not a deep knowledge. When I read your first post I opened Shake and Imported an 8b Unc clip, but I couldn’t see the image in the viewer. The thumbnail is transparent. I imported few clips with the same codec, and it happens the same to all of them. Only with the 8b Unc from Apple. The 8b Unc from Sheers play OK, the same than the 10b Unc from Apple and Sheers.
Well tomorrow I will try to see what happens.
One more think, if you go to try to pll a key you should apply some “Chroma smoothing” filter in FC before you send to Shake. There are some macros for Chroma smoothing in Shake for DV, but I havent see for HD footage.
I hope I didn’t mixed you up more.
Cheers,
rafael

[Magda Fernandez]

Thank you, Rafael! I’m beginning to see at least some of the sources of my confusion. I’m going to try your suggestions and see what happens.

As for your transparent thumbnail issue, I encountered a similar thing yesterday when sending one of my clips from FCP to Shake. The only thing that I recall doing differently that time was not changing the Sequence title when sending to Shake. When I tried sending it again next time with a new different title, the thumbnail image appeared above my Shake node.

Since I am a newbie I have no idea if this is related to your invisible thumbnail problem or not. But you’re welcome to give it a shot and see if it makes a difference. You’ve probably checked the obvious, too, of clicking ThumbnailsDisplay on in Shake’s GUI Controls and saving those Interface Settings. My apologies if this is stating the obvious, but this is a consequence of my newbiness.

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte

[Rafael Amador]

I tried few things. Changing the name, seting the extension (.mov). No way. The curious thing is, as I told you, only with the Apple 8bUnc. The rest OK.
Just to ad something about Shake. f you don’t set the field order in the “Source” and in the Global>”Render”, this doesn’t mean that you will get a progresive movie comming out of Shake. If you want a progresive movie you have to do it with “Remap”, “Convert” or the Deinterlacing node. And to do it you have to set the field order in Source and Rendering control to OFF.
Ther are many effects that don’t need to set the field order and field rendering. For example if you make a color correction you will have not problem. The changes are done in a frame basis s ther is not difference beteen on field and the other. The transformation in the two fields is the same.
But when you are moving something in the screen the field order need to be the correct one because the transformation sufferd by the two fields are different. They must be processed in a certain order. If no, what you will get from your File-out will look very bad.
Well now a go to sleep. I’f tomorrow i see something that can helps you I’ll post it.
cheers,
rafael

[Burt Hazard]

Charlotte,

Mainly the deinterlacing option is there because for a most compositing operations (roto, paint, keying, etc.) using interlaced footage would be a total nightmare, if not impossible; you always need to see the fine detail of the edges. One way of looking at it is that you are temporarily working on video footage deinterlaced in any compositing app, and then rendering back out in its native interlaced form if you need to. Rendering a Flipbook basically renders the viewer into RAM (similar to an After Effects preview thing), unless you choose Render Disk Flipbook which does create a disk QT file. Usually, you do all the final rendering in the FileOut node(s).

One thing you might check right away is to select your FileIn node and make sure you click on the “Auto” button to the far right of the timeRange Global parameters…this will automatically set your Global frame range of your footage, then click the little “house” icon at the bottom right of the Shake interface to set the frame range of your timeline (it sounds like you may just be viewing the first frame of your footage ’cause the time range is only set to “1” or something). If you have further problems, I’d suggest going over to the main Shake forum here at the Cow; those guys’ll figure it out.

[Magda Fernandez]

Thank you, Burt. I appreciate your explanation about deinterlacing. My globals time range parameter was accurate. But I believe that my problem was a cache settings problem because after applying the free Shake Configuration download, which I learned about in a Cow post, the frozen Viewer problem disappeared.

Boy, am I glad these forums exist!

By the way, I’m not sure why, but my post was assigned to this FCP forum, although I requested the Shake forum when I opened my account. But so what? You and Rafael have been tremendously helpful!

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte