[Pat Ortman]

Ah, but I’m into beating myself up 😉

Kidding. You’re totally right. We’re good to go with it as-is now.

THANKS!

[Pat Ortman]

You RULE! That’s exactly what I found out in Shake, going thru field by field. My motion is exactly the same in both. Perfecto!

THANKS!

[Pat Ortman]

OK, an experiment I just did:

I imported this 640 x 360 footage from Final Cut Pro which was originally HDV into Apple’s Shake.

Shake lets me increment the footage in field intervals. Maybe AE does too, but I don’t know how. ANYWAY:

It’s clear that my 640 x 360 footage is the exact same across both fields.

If I inspect it REALLY closely, I can see the jaggies from it being interlaced source. But I have to magnify it a LOT.

I’m not sure it’ll be noticeable at the low res that the festival will be showing it.

Still, the best solution is probably to go back to the HDV footage and do Magic Bullet to 29.97 THAT to progressive. Despite the day and a half render time I’ll be getting.

In the meantime I’m finishing my 640×480 backup render, just in case there’s problems.

If anyone has any additional ideas I am all ears…

Pat

[Pat Ortman]

I see what you’re saying… definitely an option since my Z1 downconverts HDV to DV on the fly (DVCAM I hope)… but I’m worried I’d be losing a lotta detail and we’d have yet another round of compression going on.

[Pat Ortman]

Right. So, what’s the best way to do this?

Clearly if I output 640×360 uncompressed 8 bit and bring that to Magic Bullet to make 30p material it’ll render WAY faster than if it was 1080i material going into Magic Bullet.

What’s really getting me here is:

Magic Bullet doesn’t recognize my 640×360 file as interlaced to begin with (and it sure doesn’t look interlaced to my eyes). How can I tell? I went to frames with tons of motion and looked closely- no jaggy interlacing artifacts at all in my 640 wide output from Final Cut. Weird!

Pat

[Pat Ortman]

Hi TonyTony,

They want a digital file- Quicktime 640×480, preferably progressive. Framerate they don’t care about. My DP does, though- I did a test with Magic Bullet and another test with DVFilm Maker and she absolutely HATED the weird stutter that the fillm got.

An update:
Since I wrote my first post this morning I’ve tried something else:

Take my original HDV project in Final Cut Pro and output it as 640×360, uncompressed 8 bit.

Import that into After Effects and put it in a comp that’s 640×480 (giving me my letterbox).

Render with “field rendering” turned OFF (it had this off by default, interestingly enough).

It has about 2 hours left to go, so I’m not sure if this is going to do it or not.

—

Magic Bullet does have the ability to make a 29.97p file from 29.97 60i… but to do that it looks like I’d have to import true HDV footage (which I have available, I rendered out the timeline in Final Cut as HDV 1080i as well). And that means Magic Bullet will have to process 1440 x 1080 (VERY slow) to get me my 29.97p file (I’d stretch it to 1920 x1080 there too)… my concern is this is not something I’ve done before and if I try it I only get ONE shot at it (which is REALLY scary)…

[Pat Ortman]

Well, he may be opening up HDV footage that’s squeezed and noticing that when he goes to make a composition that there doesn’t seem to be any presets that fit the 1.3 ratio he wants. Of course, you can just drag your footage to the “make new comp” button and you’ll magically get a new comp with the right settings…

Pat

[Pat Ortman]

OK, a test:

I scaled and rendered the nice 29.97p Magic Bullet’d file out of After Effects as animation codec and then used compressor to create the DVD file.

It is NOTICEABLY lighter and more true to what I see onscreen than the version I brought into FCP.

Which tells me, perhaps, I need to do some sort of adjustment to the AEFX file before bringing it into FCP.

Chris Meyers says to do an adjustment layer to bring the colors back to video format.

But I thought the Magic Bullet Broadcast Safe filter woulda done that for me…

Or that After Effects made this automatic by now…