[Esben Hardt]

PS. The master file was cleared today in a third studo looking at a top-of-the-line Sony grading monitor. now I awaiting the final judgement from the TV distributor….

[Esben Hardt]

Ok, just to make it clear. The picture above looks like this on BOTH my 3 studio monitors (see specs at top) AND the computer screens. The picture looked like this on the footage coming from Resolve or Avid. I have a sneaky suspicion that the clip has been scaled slightly in one of these applications, in other words it has zoomed in on an interlacing error. Maybe interlaced footage has been added to a progressive workflow somewhere along the line, I don’t know..?

The fix? I went back to Avid, and asked for an export of this clip again in 100% scale, then zoomed into the picture in FCP, bypassing Resolve. Problem gone!

[Esben Hardt]

Thanks for helping. And maybe I am chasing a ghost here..? I have been to an online studio today and followed the copying of SD Digibeta tapes from my HD masterfiles, and as far as I could see there was nothing wrong with them! Tomorrow I am going to the other studio who told me that there is a problem with the HD master file. I want to see it for myself. I want to know what they can see on their monitors that I can’t here…
I will let you know the verdict! For now we will assume that there are no error, but I did experience this (see photo) on my studio monitors when I scaled one of the clips in the timeline to 104%. Which is why I am worried there is some kind of interlacing error “baked into” some of the clips?!

Regarding monitoring.
I have also been thinking that interlaced will always show the jagged lines on a computer monitor. But I have never seen it as bad as I see it on this film. Or maybe I have just never noticed… Maybe if I could show a picture of it then maybe it would make more sense. Maybe in the next post!

I get very bad jagged lines around anything that moves. When I play the film back in full scale resolution on a computerscreen I don’t see anything. But if I scale the player window down I get bad jagged edges. Not so bad when I’m using Quicktime Player, but very bad when I’m using the spacebar shortcut in Finder.
Is this normal?
So how should it look when the field order is played back wrong? And how should it look when it’s right?
My image looks very similar to the picture in this post (when viewed at 10-24%) and they are talking about an error in the field order or bad resizing, https://community.avid.com/forums/p/102568/591090.aspx#591090

Regarding the timeline
So why was the timeline not progressive? Well this film has been on a long road before it ended in my FCP timeline. A great deal has been out of my hands and control, which is why I wasn’t reluctant to believe that there WAS an interlace problem. I have merely collected the pieces in FCP.
I’ll try and explain… 90% of the original footage IS in fact interlaced, and around 10% are from DSLR’s which are progressive. All the material have been transcoded to ProRes 422 using MPEG Streamclip, and after going through this software all the clips are flagged as Upper field order (I’ve checked using Item/Properties/Format in FCP)). But the clips were first edited in Avid using AMA linking. Then they’ve been transcoded to mxf files (DNxHD) and moved to DaVinci Resolve where they’ve been graded. Then transcoded to ProRes 422 in a TARGET MOVIE file (please don’t ask..), plus a few individual graded clips have been rendered out of Resolve as ProRes 422. Most of these files are now flagged as NONE in field order (?) which I believed was causing the interlacing error. On top of this a few files have been rendered out of Avid in ProRes, some are flagged NONE, some are flagged UPPER, but they all were collected in a timeline in FCP.

Maybe there is nothing wrong with mixing all these files together in FCP despite the wrong flagging in the field order for some of them, but why does two studios reject my film then?
What I am looking for is a 100% method to tell if the fields are actually all in the right order? And a fix for it if they aren’t? I would like a STONE SURE WAY of knowing that a field error has NOT been “baked into” a progressive timeline along the way and exported along with this error within it?

I have tried adding the Shift Field filter to the clips in the timeline, but THEN it starts stuttering horribly when I view it on my monitors.
I have tried right-clicking all the clips in the timeline and manually choosing Upper field using Item/Properties/Format. But there are no visible difference so I don’t know if this makes any difference.