[Erik Pontius]

You might try something like this.
Duplicate your layer.
On the top layer, mask the area around the head in a irregular shape, change the mask to subtract. You now have a hole where his head was. Adjust the mask feather a little to soften the edges.
Move the duplicated layer to position a bit of the grass that doesn’t have his head in it, to fill in the hole.
Most likely since this fellow has just had his head removed, you’ll be compositing in blood and lumps of brain and skull, covering up a lot of the area where his head was. Experiment a little with it.
Probably too late for this, but this shot should have been planned as a mix of digital and practical effects. Andrew’s effect works well because the guy disappears off frame after the headshot. You’re going to have a harder time selling the effect since there (I presume) were no practical gore effects shot, such as blood and chum on his shirt and ground. These will need to be composited in, and quite frankly digital blood by itself, just looks like digital blood. Recent films like George Romero’s “Land of the Dead” have used digital blood effects to accentuate “R-rated” practical effects to make them even gorier.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You’ll have a big mess on your hands doing it this way.
Imagine if you have interlaced footage a black ball on a white background. That ball moves from the left edge of the screen to the right edge of the screen. Deinterlacing in the method that you describe would result in a frame of video that contains a mix of images that are 1/25th of a second off, creating a jagged edge on the ball since one half of the lines of the ball have moved forward.
Another example would be in the case where you have two scenes, a bright daylight scene and a dark scene and a cut between them. When deinterlacing in the method you are describing, the cut between the bright scene and the dark scene will contain half of the lines of the bright scene and half of the lines of the dark scene.
These are the kinds of things that proper deinterlacing software tries to prevent. Analyzing the footage to determine how best to generate the missing field.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

stock.xchng and stockxpert are good, used them a couple of times for various projects. You can occasionally find good stuff on MorgueFile (morguefile is a newspaper term and not dead people)

https://www.sxc.hu/
https://www.stockxpert.com/
https://www.morguefile.com/

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You might also find out what they really need. If the source is DV, it’s not going to get any better by creating an uncompressed AVI file…it’s just going to be a very big file.
I often get similar requests, often times the person requesting the files is not the person actually using them (the editor, web developer, etc…). Providing an uncompressed file can sometime avoid generational quality loss, most likely they will either be importing this file into an NLE to include in a larger piece, whereby providing DV25 or something like the Avid codecs would work or they will encode it to another format like flash or windows media, etc…where most of the compression apps will take a QT file which could be compressed with a lossless codec like QT animation.
Some times it’s a matter of providing what they really need versus what they think they want. Ask to talk to whoever is actually using it to get a better understanding of what is really needed.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Don’t know…I don’t have a Mojo SDI…just have the original mojo’s, which light up. If it works…great.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I wasn’t sure from your initial post how you had things hooked up. You need the blackburst running to both the deck and the mojo. Most likely you’ll use a loop though on the back of the deck (ref in/out), so connect the blackburst to the deck’s ref in and then the ref out from the deck to the mojo. I’m not familiar with the deck, but there maybe menu settings for using external ref video rather than internal ref. You should get a little “ref” light showing up on the front of the mojo.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Good advice. Always get specifics from your client…a 5 minute phone call or quick email can prevent doing hours of work over again.
You might find out what they are going to be using it in. For instance, if they are going to be importing it into an Avid, it has project presets for 1080i 59.94 (aka 29.97 frames per second).
Interlaced 1080 (for north America) can be noted as 1080i29.97, 1080i, 29.97i and 1080i59.94. Some cameras (like the Sony Z1u HDV camera) show 60i on their LCD’s and viewfinders, in which they’ve taken a little liberty with rounding up 59.94 up to 60i to save space in their displays…which can be confusing since there are ATSC formats that are 60, as ATSC has both fractional and integer frame rates.
The only ATSC HD standard that uses 59.94 frames per second is 720p59.94, and is usually used for sports programming.

Anyway, double-check with your client as to what they really needs…beats doing everything over again.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

59.94 fps is not frames per second but rather fields per second. Two fields make a frame, so 29.97 frames per second is 59.94 fields per second.
Just another way (one of several) of notating that this is interlaced and is HD rather than standard def. It is basically the HD equivalent of NTSC.
In AE you’d set up your comp at 1920×1080 29.97 and render out interlaced upper field first.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Are you using windows with dual processors and AE 6.5?
If so try this:
https://support.thefoundry.co.uk/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1132851654

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Couple of other handy things for dealing with many layers.
Pre-compose groups of layers that you will not be changing much. Precomposing, will create another composition with those layers in it and then nest the new composition into the original…essentially grouping the clips into one layer. To adjust these “grouped” clips, you would open the nested comp and adjust the clips and attributes there…changes are then reflected in the original comp.
Another handy thing is the “shy” switch. That little icon that looks like a guy peeking over a wall. Click this switch for layers you want to hide then click the same icon at the top of the timeline window to “shy” or hide those layers, toggle the switch back and forth to make them visable again.
Shy layers are still in the comp and they are still visible in the comp window, just not visable in the timeline. So if you have 25 layers and 15 of them you’ve already worked with and are already locked down, you can shy the layers and hit the shy switch and your visible timeline layers will be reduced from 25 to 10, making it easier to work with.

Erik