Shift Fields filter

[Bill Davis]

In video?

Seems kinda strange.

There are plenty of circumstances where it’s useful to have field dominance changed during transcoding , but to actually swap the original order of fields in a motion file I would think would lead to terrible results in any clip.

Every frame would jump back and forth as something like a pan was reproduced with the temporarily later fields coming before a previous ones.

Nightmare.

What are you actually trying to do here?

If it’s something like kill interlace stair-stepping in freeze frames? if so, it’s usually better to duplicate fields than to re-order them.

If you can describe the problem you’re trying to solve a bit more, perhaps we can suggest something?

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Jari Innanen]

You can override the field dominance in the Inspector. Info tab -> Settings View.

[Andreas Kiel]

Bill,

Why should it be a nightmare to swap fields?
Simple things like running interlaced video in reversed speed will require swapping fields, same as flipping video vertical.
FCPX does handle different types of video inside a project quite nicely, but sometimes it’s needed to do such simple things.

-Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Oliver Peters]

The reason it’s a valid question is because FCP “legacy” always automatically added one when placing SD footage on an HD timeline as well as the other way around. I’m not sure how X processes this now, since all of my X projects so far have been strictly NTSC (not mixed) or 24p HD.

Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Bret Williams]

This is also where one deinterlaces now since no more deinterlace filter. It works wonderfully with much better results than 7. I just had to add some DV footage to a 1080p project. The deinterlace worked really well. And of course like everything else in X, you can just highlight all the clips and then go to info and check the box.

[Bill Davis]

[Andreas Kiel] “Simple things like running interlaced video in reversed speed will require swapping fields, same as flipping video vertical.”

Ah,

I somehow took this as someone wanting to swap fields in a standard forward motion clip.

All I could see in my brain was a series of playing cards where red and black kings get flipped through and you get a nice picture of a dark pink king facing the same way. But swap the direction of the black kings heads – and you set his whole head oscillating.

(weird brain, I know.)

Reverse motion makes perfect sense.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bret Williams]

The fact that HD uses a different field order than most SD formats also makes sense. Doesn’t really have anything to do with reverse motion.

[Bill Davis]

Doesn’t it?

Field order is unimportant so long as the temporal cadence is maintained. But if you do what the OP seemed to imply – which is take a field order that’s already been established – and use a post tool to literally “swap fields” (which IIRC, is what he indicated) then you’re risking messing up that temporal cadence.

Everyone here understands that in a 30 frame (and more so in a 24 frame) cadence, objects like a rapidly moving shot crossing car change position not just frame to frame, but in fact, field to field.

All I’m suggesting is that if you literally break apart an existing video sequence that has a “first to last” cadence – and swap the two fields of an interlaced signal – with everything else remaining consistent – it just stands to reason that you’ll be introducing motion anomalies.

So it kinda does have something to do with reverse motion – in that that is one of the special cases where reversing field order is necessary to maintain field to field cadence.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bret Williams]

Of course, but you shouldn’t have to add a shift fields filter. And I’ve never had to. When you tell an editing app to play something backward, well, it should sorta know what to do.

It should know what to do when you put a lower field first clip in a upper field first sequence as well. AE knows what to do. Just as long as it knows the dominance of all your media, it deals with it correctly. But in legacy a filter had to be added for some reason. The shift fields filter. I guess you never had to deal with that. It was all fine until you decided to copy to another sequence where the shift fields filter wasn’t desired or needed, but yet it came right along. Doh!

But anyway, I think X deals with all this the way it should on it’s own. Just like how it adds correct pulldown to 24p in a 30i sequence, or interlaces 60p in a 30i sequence. Good stuff.