What’s up with this clip?

[Elijah Lynn]

I emailed Graeme Natress about a filter for this. I just don’t know what to use for it. I think he could figure it out in 5 seconds.

[Tom Wolsky]

It would help if you provided some format information. What are the specs of the clip and for the sequence you’re working in? Use item properties to find out.

Does the movie eventually play, or is it just a frame? How big is the linked file?

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Tom Wolsky]

Never mind I got the file. I’m not seeing any interlacing on it. Nor does it look like it was shot on green screen.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Elijah Lynn]

Exactly! It doesn’t look interlaced but look at their necks and you see the jagged lines jetting into their shoulders and neck.

It sure isn’t progressive either. Because progressive shouldn’t have those nasty jaggies.

If you do a Command + 2 and look to the lady just right of the man in blue you can see the green in her hair. That whole wall was green.

Edit – Let’s just say that I want to make this clip progressive, for the web. I want it to be as crisp as HD should be.

[Elijah Lynn]

Here are some screenshots at 00:55:03:23

Notice the horizontal banding on the ladies in pink near their shoulders and the mans color shmear onto his neck.

[Tom Wolsky]

That looks like compression artifacting not interlacing. Downside of very heavily compressed formats like HDV.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Elijah Lynn]

Ok, for some reason dropbox is muting out the lines in the gallery. Maybe they do some sort of optimization to galleries. Anyways,

https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/26576/Picture%201.png
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/26576/Picture%202.png
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/26576/Picture%203.png

So the main problem with these clips is that the DVD is playing along and boom it turns to a puddle of mud. Like a big field problem. I have my sequence set to HDV with prores codec. I export a self contained and then export a progressive .m2v file from compressor. All the other footage I have looks good. I am wondering those lines are from the keying software. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be terribly bad if it ws just the lines but it’s like it is interlaced with previous line doubling or something.

FC browser reports them as HDV 1080 60i. My other clips that look good are 1080 60i as well. But these clips exhibit some strange symptoms. Some of the other clips from the same shoot were exported in AIC. They look truly progressive.

It’s like these look progressive until you start using them and really looking at them. I will upload a larger file.

Then take that larger file and throw the deinterlace filter on from within QT. If it was progressive it wouldn’t do anything, but these clips, it makes better.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’m with Tom. I don’t think this footage is interlaced, I think you are looking at compression.

Are you capturing this footage from tape or are you the one doing the greenscreen composite?

Did you get the raw media (I.e. unkeyed) and the project file or are you rebuilding it?

Once you answer those, I’ll have more questions.

Jeremy

[Elijah Lynn]

Hi Tom and Jeremy,

The crew who was doing the project bailed. They gave us a Gdrive2 with everything on it. I don’t have any access to the source footage and the prekey footage is not on the drive.

Here is a link to a much larger 250 MB clip. Play this and then turn QT’s deinterlace filter on and off while it is playing or looping. You can see the image get remarkably better when the deinterlace filter is applied. If I use this filter on the progressive footage nothing happpens. Also when I run this clip through compressor to deinterlace it does get slightly better,

If this was a progressive file then it shouldn’t be giving my DVD player a hard time, would it? It plays fine on windows w/ VLC media Player, an Apple DVD player and a Sony DVD/VHS combo/Samsung 15″ crt but the Toshiba 22″LCD/DVD combo has issues with these clips. When the Toshiba cuts to these clips in the track (same source *.m2v) they become very degraded they “jump” and “flicker” at times too. I have scaling turned off when I am testing this.

[David Roth weiss]

I’ve been working to help Elijah sort things out and have actually seen some of this footage. It is very difficult to do a thorough forensic examination of his footage, because those who did the processing are now just footnotes of history. One can only surmise how things arrived in their present state at this point, but my best guess is that they deinterlaced this footage very poorly, using the FCP deinterlace filter, and throwing out half the vertical resolution, among other things.

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

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