[Anna Tam]

Wow thank you so much for this incredible explanation!

I really appreciate it. I’m primarily a musician, and only make videos to accompany my music work. I don’t know much about photography, so this is super helpful. I feel like I have a much better understanding now of not only the XH-A1, but how to approach shooting video in general.

I’m going to print it up and use it as a guide for shooting for next my project!

Thank you,

A.

[Anna Tam]

Hi Roger, thank you so much for the helpful replies!

That’s a great idea — connecting the camera to an HDTV and checking the footage that way.

The room I filmed in was very well lit with continuous lighting for green-screen. I uploaded a few seconds from the footage to the FCPX post and was told by someone who works on FCPX and reviewed the footage that the blurry frames I see are camera motion blur, and that they are not a result of an issue with capturing. But still, on some of the other shots, particularly the long shots actually (as opposed to medium shots and close ups) I find the amount of noise in the image very surprising. I filmed it in a very very bright environment.

From your experience, do you think that this kind of camera motion blur and noise has to do with incorrect shutter speed settings? I left the camera on A, and focused manually.

Thank you,
A.

[Anna Tam]

Thank you so much, Darren. So grateful that you (and everyone else who generously shared their knowledge!) took the time to help me with this. I didn’t realize it was the camera motion blur that caused the blurry frames.

The thing that most important to me at this point is sharpness, so I will follow your recommendation to edit on a 30p timeline and turn on frame blending and de-interlacing.

[Anna Tam]

Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to help me with this.

The footage was shot on a Canon XH A1 HDV, and I used the 1080 60i settings. The Camera was on Auto, all the other settings were left on default (I reset all the settings before I started shooting) and the focus was controlled manually.

This is a link to the captured file from FCPX.

https://we.tl/UPZd6s95cT

Is it possible that for some reason FCPX isn’t capturing the footage right, and that’s why there’s blurriness on on some of the frames?

When I looked at the tape on the camera itself, on the viewer, it looks much sharper than the captured result.

Thanks,
A.

[Anna Tam]

Thanks.

Does this mean that if I want the motion (of which there’s a lot of, dancing, and singing) to remain sharp, I’m better off following your (Darren) suggestion?

That is – putting the 60i on a 30p, exporting it as 30p and then bringing it back to a 60p timeline where the 60fps animation is? Or in this case will FCPX do the same thing and when the 30p is on the 60p timeline it will create blurriness where there’s motion because it will duplicate the frames to create 60 of them?

I’m confused about this because even when I create a 30p timeline, generate a place holder, and then drop the 60i onto the timeline, some frames are still very blurry and other sharp. It’s something like 20 sharp 10 blurry, but not exactly. I tried checking and unchecking the ‘deintrlace’ box, and tried different Field Dominance override settings.

Would it be useful if I uploaded a short clip I captured?

Thanks so much for all the help.

[Anna Tam]

Thanks so much for the helpful response. Sorry for being confusing.

I followed your instructions, I set a timeline based on the first clip that I dropped from the 60FPS animation. It created a timeline which is 1080p | HD. I then brought in the filmed 60i footage from the tape and checked ‘deinterlace’.

I don’t see any interlacing lines, but there is still significant inconsistency in quality from one frame to another, every few frames there’s a very blurry and seemingly degraded frame, and after a few frames it’s sharp again.

I’m including a couple of screenshots, first one is of the blurry/degraded quality frame, the second one is a few frames later when the image is sharp again, and the third one is of my entire project and you can see my project settings and clips.

Screenshot 1 (Blurry Frame)
Screenshot 2 (Sharp Frame)
Screenshot 3 (FCPX Screenshot)

Is the change in quality between the frames happening because of the 60i/de-interlacing?

Thank you!

[Anna Tam]

Oh, I think I understand, do you mean exporting the 60i footage from the tape into 30P via a 30P FCPX timeline, and then bringing it back to a 60P timeline where both the tape footage and the 60FPS animation footage could co-exist?

Also, if you don’t mind me asking, do you think all of this in vein because primarily this video is going to live on YouTube and YouTube doesn’t recognize 60P?

Thanks so much!

[Anna Tam]

Thank you very much for your reply!

Would it cause problems in exporting if I put the footage on 1080 @ 60P? Should I then deinterlace it by checking the ‘deinterlace’ box in the video info panel?

The reason I’m asking this is because I’m combining the footage from the HDV tape, with footage from animation which is 60FPS and when I put it on the 30P timeline it looks less smooth.

Thank you,

A.