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Struggling to get rid of interlacing lines on a mixed footage timeline
Dear Creative Cow people I am desperate to solve what seems like a crazily complicated problem! I have a DV-PAL timeline that has on it SD DV footage as well as down-converted (from Sony v1 camera on squeeze function) HDV footage. When I play it back, I see lines and in areas where the clothing/object is red, it looks almost pixelated. I have been advised not to use the FCP de-interlacing function as this drops half the image so instead I have used the flicker filter at maximum. On its own, the flicker filter did not do the job, but when I set the sequence setting to lower field dominant, it does the job for most of the clips. However, for some of the clips, the combination of the flicker filter and the lower field makes the image look totally blurry and unusable, sigh! So my questions are as follows:
1. Should I use the flicker filter or rather something else? Should I be using different filters on different clips?
2. Is there some way I can tell what is SD DV and what is down-converted HDV from FCP (can’t see this in the format properties)- or does it not matter anyway?
3. Is there some way to have some of the sequence lower field dominant but other parts upper field dominant?Any advice would be much much much appreciated!! REcapturing the footage is really a hard option- over 300 hours of footage, not all tapes easily available and sound mix etc all already done so any changes in the edit will require massive outlay in cost and effort.
Thanks so much!!
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3 Replies
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JOanne, that sounds like a bear of a project. Dealing with interlaced footage that has been converted improperly can be a pain to work with. What is the HDV down-converted to, DV? Was all of the footage shot as interlaced or progressive? If progressive, you can set your timeline and the clips themselves (right click the field dominance attribute in the bin) all to progressive. Again, even if the HDV footage was shot as progressive, it could have issues to contend with if it wasn’t converted properly.
Also, read the section of this article which talks about setting the canvas to 100% to see both fields, in case you’re not using a studio monitor:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/motion_text_in_fcp_spencer.htmlThe compression artifact blocks in the reds is a weakness of DV and DVCPROHD (I’m not sure about HDV, but HDV has a higher compression rate to begin with).
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HI Brad,
Thanks so much for your help! The HDV footage was interlaced and down-converted to standard definition DV on my Sony V1 camera. Thanks so much for the link to the article which helps me deal with not having a monitor!!
I found something called the JES deinterlacer which allows one to de-interlace footage outside of FCP- have tested it out now and it seems to work MUCH better than FCP’s deinterlacer and flicker filter, even mimimising jagged edges dramatically- does anyone have experience with this?
Brad, you say the red problems are compression artifacts? Are they there cos I downconverted off camera and not off an FCP timeline, or would it not have made a difference?
Thanks again for your assistance!
🙂 J
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JOanne, glad I could help. With transferring footage that was filmed as interlaced, the best conversion you can hope for is one which will have some loss of resolution, but will minimize the interlacing which shows up as horizontal offset lines.
I haven’t heard of the deinterlacing application that you mentioned, but I’m glad that you found something that works better than the standard approaches in FCP. I know there are a couple of other options out there too, but I can’t remember which developers. Check out Red Giant, ReVisionFX, and The Foundry. I think 2 out of those 3 offer some of the better software approaches to deinterlacing footage for progressive workflows.
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