Still flickers on Firewire Output

[Chris Poisson]

Helge,

Try the flicker filter set to max, under video.

[Kevin Monahan]

Chris,
He means when he is monitorng and pauses playback, right Gix. No, there is no way to do that in DV. But perhaps that is an option for capture cards, I am not sure. Guys?

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com

[Tom Matthies]

I’m guessing that what you are seeing on your NTSC monitor is the flicker between fields, especially on a motion clip. You are seeing both field one and field two at more or less the same time. Since, on a clip with a lot of motion, you subject had actually moved slightly in the frame from the time the camera scanned field one to the time it scanned field two, and both fields are being displayed, the “freeze frame” will jitter when it is paused. In the FCP canvas, you aren’t seeing both fields on the computer screen, so you don’t notice it. On your TV monitor, both fields are being displayed, so it’s very noticable. Other than deinterlacing (and loosing resolution) that’s pretty much the way it works in “regular” video. This is probably a function of the ADVC box and I don’t think there is a way to tell the system to display only field one or field two. I could be wrong, but just about all of the I/O boxes will show both fields at the same time.
Make sense? And if this isn’t what you’re having trouble with, well…as Gilda used to say on Saturday Night Live…”Never mind!”
Tom

[Zolotroph]

[Tom Matthies] “You are seeing both field one and field two at more or less the same time. Since, on a clip with a lot of motion, you subject had actually moved slightly in the frame from the time the camera scanned field one to the time it scanned field two, and both fields are being displayed, the “freeze frame” will jitter when it is paused.”

Bingo. What Tom said.

This is normal, and correct. Welcome to the wonderful world of interlaced video. For some real fun, try doing paint or roto work on interlaced video in a compositing application. Unless you deinterlace the video first and make separate frames from each field (effectively doubling the clip length), and then reinterlace the clip for output, your comps will look like crap.

-zolo

[Helge Frueh]

First of all, I’d like to say thank you for all your answers.

Yes, I meant the jitter when playback is paused (hit space to play, hit space to pause -> jitter). There is no jitter in the canvas, just on the TV. To be more precisely, on a PC I worked with a Canopus DV Storm capture card with analog output to a TV – and may be that was the reason that I had the option to output ‘freeze frames’ as lower or upper fields. I bought the ADVC box only for the mac to be able to connect an external monitor.

Well, too bad, that there is no switch to have FCP deinterlace the actual (paused) frame on the firewire ouput…

Anyway, thanks again, and I think I can live with (as everybody does)
Helge