[Michael Gissing]

What happens when you open a new sequence and drop one shot into it? If it asks to set the sequence settings to match the clip settings does the field dominance of the sequence change. In fact what does the sequence change to (if at all)and what were the original sequence settings?

Do this with a clip that has been captured but not changed to none. I suspect you are loading Psf material and so a 60i sequence is what is needed with the correct field dominance to display the footage correctly.

If so, your DVD and broadcast requirements can be interlaced so it becomes an issue of how to deinterlace for the web if that is the case. even though a sequence is interlaced, it still has the progressive look.

[Michael Gissing]

I assume you are going to audio post, so be very careful about changing sound files with applications like STP. If you do want to do that then please leave the original file on another track with the volume pulled down so your sound post people can get back to the original file.

If they have access to a CEDAR DNS1000, you may be able to reduce some of the ambience. CEDAR is basically a denoiser but can dry reverb to a limited extent in combination with good EQ.

In my experience, editing rooms rarely have good speaker monitoring and the noisy computers are often in the same space so it is a less than ideal environment to monitor something as delicate as this sort of processing. If you have headphones, then that would help solve that issue, but please leave the original in the timeline.

[Michael Gissing]

Firstly your sequence settings in the audio tab must be set for 4 channel output.

Then on the timeline, control click on the audio channels (down near the padlock symbol) and you will see a menu pop up to set each channels output.

[Michael Gissing]

[Baz Leffler] “Remember FCP tone is 0db and digital requires -20”

FCP actually defaults to tone @ -12dbfs. -20dbfs is correct SMPTE broadcast spec and -18dbfs is PAL broadcast spec. Australia is the only PAL country to adopt the -20dbfs SMPTE spec.

Don’t sweat it though Baz, no-one seems to reject PAL tapes with -20dbfs tone anyway. At the end of the day, the tone reference on a digital tape is redundant but comforting to the old analog broadcasters.

[Michael Gissing]

It may also be a resolution issue with the stills. What pixel aspect are they?

[Michael Gissing]

[Steve oakley] “bars aren’t useless in the digital age because there is still a LOT of analog video out there.”

That is why I said bars on camera tapes. Thankfully broadcasters don’t transmit rushes, although some productions make me wonder if that would be more entertaining.

I still put bars on digi beta & HDCam masters although broadcast techs tell me they never change a machine’s settings regardless of bars. Analog broadcasters who play of analog tape machines might but even in a lot of analog broadcasts, digital playback machines are in use and do not get tweaked per tape.

[Michael Gissing]

[Brett Ramsey] “I will try exporting progressive and then setting the field order in FCP that might fix it.”

Only do that if you want to throw away half your screen resolution. If you let me know what the sequence setting is, I can advise if the solution is to add the shift fields filter in FCP.

[Michael Gissing]

I strongly recommend you take the tape to an audio post facility to get it into a file that can be run through either Pitch ‘N Time or MPEX3 software to stretch without changing pitch.

If it is a long form show, the percentage is complicated, not a neat 4.1% but with lots of decimals or you will get drift. Time stretching without proper pitch correction will shift the audio 3/4 of a semitone flat. Not nice. Bad pitch correction sounds awful.

[Michael Gissing]

In PAL only DV codec is lower field. If you exported it as any other codec, you got the field order wrong.

Check if FCP has added the shift fields filter to the footage, but without any info on your codec and sequence settings, it is hard to guess further. It is unlikely to be an problem with FCP other than operator error I am afraid. The mp4 file should have been upper field to start with.

[Michael Gissing]

And you need to be monitoring on an external interlace monitor as well to judge accurately.

DV is an awful codec to finsh with. Better off dropping everything in an uncompressed or ProRes for the final render.