Shaky Pans

[Jm Knowles]

I am using 6.0.2. I produced the video 4×3 ratio to be safe because I wasn’t sure exactly how it was being projected – in retrospect I now see I could have gone 16×9 though.
I am surprised that Quicktime Pro and “Present Movie” isn’t a good option but very glad to learn this now. I know they like to run everything off of a laptop. However, it seems like there would be more potential for cueing problems using a DVD (through a dedicated unit as you pointed out in your follow-up post.)
You said that “progressive display” was right for me – does that mean that setting field dominance to “none” was right or is there another way to achieve this. (I seem to get this idea from the Apple article https://support.apple.com/kb/TA26010?viewlocale=en_US)

David I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your sharing your expertise with me in helping me understand better exactly what led to the problems I encountered. Thank you.

[David Roth weiss]

. [jm knowles] “You said that “progressive display” was right for me – does that mean that setting field dominance to “none” was right or is there another way to achieve this. “

In this case, you did exactly the proper thing to set field dominance to none (same as progressive), because you started with progressive frames (i.e. still photos which are not interlaced) and because the projector you used was nothing more than a very big computer monitor. Had the projector been the type that’s really like a TV, then projecting interlaced video might have proven to be a better choice, because it displays motion more smoothly.

In the future, when doing stills, choose either DV50 or preferably ProRes. Both operate in 4:2:2 color space, unlike DV which operate in 4:1:1 color space, which means that DV chucks out so many pixels and thus “guesstimates” so much color information, that graphics, stills, and text all look completely horrible.

So, in a nutshell, when working on a project with stills, not video from a camera, the big lesson is, you need to setup your project based on the type of monitor your final project will be displayed on (computer=always non-interlaced or deinterlaced, TV=depends upon original material and movement).

Oh, one other thing, if you display on a computer screen at 50% of original size or smaller, you needn’t deinterlace (most of the time), because the scan lines are combined during down-scaling.

BTW, I’m glad to help JM, and it’s cool to see that you are really getting it all…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Jm Knowles]

So I am guessing my shaky pans and occasional dropped frames were based on the extra horsepower that the outmoded compression “none” was taking up and that if I had used DVC50 or ProRes I would have been better off. (Also – would that be ProRes of ProRes HQ?)

And also are you saying that I should not use Quicktime at all as a way of displaying these videos in the future. What if Quicktime is the only option (i.e. they don’t have a dedicated DVD)? And is it ok to export using H.264 if I am in a position where I have to use Quicktime. (I understand this codec is somewhat processor intensive too and it was not playing very smoothly on the laptop PC they were originally going to use.) The version we ended up using was done through Quicktime conversion using H.264, quality set to high, keyframes set to “auto” and quality set to “best”, encoding set to “best” (multipass). I forget what I used for the data rate. It was either “auto” or it might have been limited to 1500 kbits in an attempt to make it more processor friendly. In the end I had a roughly 100MB file for a 5 minute video.

Thanks so much.