[Bobby Hall]

Thanks for your help Michael!

[Bobby Hall]

My footage has been transcoded to AIC. I’m editing a project using footage I shot years ago on an old Canon Vixia. This was when I knew nothing about formats or codecs. Back then the only way I knew how to get the files off that camera was to use iMovie, and it just automatically converted all the footage to AIC. So I’m stuck with these files.

As I was typing this reply, I decided to see what would happen if I just changed the compressor in the sequence settings from AIC to ProRes 422. I exported a sample and it seems to have cured it! I was afraid that I was going to have to re-transcode all this AIC footage to ProRes or apply the de-interlace filter on practically every clip. But just changing the sequence settings to ProRes 422 seems to have worked.

I’m glad it worked, but why did it work? Does changing the sequence setting to ProRes mean that it converted the AIC sequence to ProRes and somehow deinterlaced it?

[Bobby Hall]

Out of curiosity I used the de-interlace filter on some of these clips and it fixed the problem. But why do I need to do this if my footage and sequence are progressive? Does it have something to do with the sequence settings saying HDTV 1080i? I thought that was some default setting used for any 1920×1080 footage since there’s no 1080p option.

[Bobby Hall]

Thanks guys. If some of my clips are 720×480 .mov files with a pixel aspect of NTSC – CCIR 601, does this mean the frame is being stretched horizontally a little bit? I thought 720×480 was only for DVDs (non-square pixels) and a computer reads them as 640×480.

[Bobby Hall]

I read on another forum that sometimes FCP 7 misinterprets progressive footage as interlaced. And then this person said you shouldn’t change the sequence settings to progressive (which I assume is “None”) because then half the fields will be discarded. Is this true? I thought if your footage is progressive and FCP misinterprets it as Upper (Odd), then you should change the field dominance to “None”, so that both your clips and sequence settings are “None”. Can someone explain which one is correct?

[Bobby Hall]

I forgot to mention that the 1920×1080 clips say “Upper (Odd) in the browser. Lower and Upper both mean interlaced, right? And is it okay to use those clips in my progressive sequence where 99.9% of the footage I’m using is progressive? My project is a video for the web.

[Bobby Hall]

Some of the clips are 720×480 .mov files with a pixel aspect of NTSC – CCIR 601, with PNG codec, and they say “Lower (Even)” in the browser.

Other ones are the same except they’re 1920×1080.

[Bobby Hall]

Why would you export in ProRes and convert that to h.264? Why not export in h.264 out of the program?

[Bobby Hall]

The Sony is from 2012. And yeah, the files are on the computer’s hard drive.

[Bobby Hall]

That sucks. Well, thanks for letting me know it’s a bug!