[Bohdan Stehlik]

Hello Andrew,

a week ago I had the same problem. I needed to do a work with Thai writings and the only app on my mac correctly recognizing the text was, just like for you, TextEdit.
So here’s the solution I used (even if it gets a little cumbersome when working with a lot of text!) :

– copy paste to TextEdit
– scale the text up to a maximum
– make a screen capture, or better a portion of it
– import the .png into Illustrator and vecorize it using LiveTrace

There you have a usible image of your text. But as I said, I just needed little snippets of text, and even then it was taking a lot of time to do it….

[Bohdan Stehlik]

Thank you very much for your answer Dave!

Some answers to your suggestions :

– We shot the images using the Sony PD-150 DV Camera, which was set to NDF (since the time of the final project was not an issue). Obviously shooting at 29.97, so I guess we can exclude problems from there.
The tapes were captured using FCP, and they play back fine on the computer and on a control monitor.

– Since the cam does not shoot in progressive mode, and we scaled and rotated the footage, it seemed necessary to de interlace. This was done in AE, using FieldsKit. (The pre-renders play back fine as well)

– The HD Comp is composed with several SD videos, so there was no up-scaling involved. It was actually a down-scaling, so no concerns about image degradation this time.

– Problems with the ProRes codec, that’s what I thought as well at a time. So we pre-rendered our footage using the Animation codec….. same result.

– I start to blame QT as well, but since the project was rendered in all versions since 7.3 maybe the problem lies elswhere.

Two month ago we had a company do a presentation at a event. They use PCs for HD pojections, in the beginning all went fine, and after a couple hours of looping it started to be very choppy and skipped frames. Restart the machines, reset the beamer, let all cool down…The guys worked all night to find the cause, without any luck.
I have never seen something like that in all those years doing video! If the problem would occur every time and on the exact same spot, I’d blame my motion paths or something else, but it comes and goes, on different playback systems!

If you get a chance, take a look at the video I uploaded, maybe you’ll see something I don’t…

[Bohdan Stehlik]

Thank you very very much, Dan!

Your expression is the solution, and saves me over a week of work…..I have to redo more than fifty comps.

I am extremely grateful for your help!

Bohdan

[Bohdan Stehlik]

You’re absolutely right, of course. I never thought about it that way, since I live and always have worked with video in PAL-land, but your explanation makes it even more obvious.
Every time I got stuck thinking about the .976 of a frame, but it’s like explaining the image size / resolution-relation in digital photography; you can’t change the length of an Inch, but you can change the size of a pixel when modifying the dpi without interpolating.
Well, I think you understand the comparison; in every case one more light went up in my head, thanks to you.

Bohdan

[Bohdan Stehlik]

Thank you Steve for confirming that. I’ll use FiledsKit, because in the past I got better results with it than using AE for the job of creating full frames.
The PD150 can shoot in progressive mode, but only at 15i/s, which is not a option.

Keith, it was exactly that article which made me think of using ProRes422 instead of the Animation codec. I have to pre-render many parts of my comps, otherwise the final output would take to long, so I try to save some disk space. (Just hoping the ProRes won’t be to dodgy with me!)
As for the HDV, I made some chromakey test with footage in that format, but due to the heavy compression of it, the SD images seemed to give better results. Even with a good lighting, the HDV results were far to blocky.

Thanks to all of your suggestions and precisions, I think I’m ready to go!

Bohdan

[Bohdan Stehlik]

Thank you all for your time and this detailed answers! Things seem much clearer to me now.

I worked on some NTSC edits in the past, but it was just capturing into FC, cutting and back to tape. This time while capturing, I got error messages about DF / NDF; strangely only on some clips from the same tape. This made me start worrying about those fraction frames, and how to handle them in AE. After your comments, I’ll stick to NDF, since time isn’t relevant in that project.

I know that converting to a different codec won’t improve the footage, but as Keith wrote, the idea was to have a larger color space for color correcting. So thank you for confirming my thoughts.

De-interlacing the footage with FieldsKit is because most of the final images will be composed out of many different shots, to give a “tiled” look, like in David Hockneys works. I supposed nudging, moving and slightly rotating around progressive footage is easier, because there won’t be any problems with the fields. Not sure if that assumption is correct.

Again, many thanks for your answers! Unfortunately because of the budget, we have to shoot in DV-Cam, the other option would have been a small HDV camera, but I know that keying HDV is a real pain!

Bohdan