[Elijah Lynn]

Well, I guess I assumed that since that is the maximum allowable that you can set in the Final Cut Pro System Settings > Memory & Cache tab.

I think they are fibbing 😉

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[Elijah Lynn]

Are you deinterlacing for DVD?

[Elijah Lynn]

Ok, I finally had some sleep and I am thinking that the reason the LCD DVD player had a problem was because it simply treated the file as Bottom Field first.

The DVD played flawlesly on the other DVD player and CRT.

The progressive plays flawlessly on both because if their is a field mismatch it just, doesn’t matter.

So is the flag that is set in the file to specify UFF or BFF must not be set correctly to ensure 100% compatibility.

I am thinking about taking a HEX editor to the resulting *.m2v to see what the flags actually consist of.

[Elijah Lynn]

Thanks a bunch Wayne! I am going to give that a try. I called Apple multiple times about this and they never made mention of it.

I sure hope that helps things out, that would be amazing! Then all I have to do is get Qmaster setup on the other Octo for some nice render times!

Even after I close all of the sequences etc, my green bar “preview” is not clear and often fuzzy.

Cheers

[Elijah Lynn]

I just tested this out. I changed the field output to progressive and it plays great (3 seconds worth/5 minutes of render) on both the CRT and LCD. Media Info for Mac claims it is UFF, Upper Field First, but it is in fact progressive!

Dunno what happened before but my hunch is that the DVD player could not read it was lower field first, maybe it was DVD SP maybe it was me, who knows.

I have all 56 minutes set to render to progressive from the ProRes render of the HDV 1080 60i.

This appears to be a very high quality workflow. I will see tomorrow, by the time I am done rendering everything. Oh btw, this is on an 8 core too!

What is weird is that I have searched everywhere and read the Bonsai method etc and nothing really covered my workflow, which I thought was very common. If this works hopefully it will help someone else too.

Please let me know if putting progressive footage on DVD’s has unknown consequences.