[Paul Nelson]

Hey Aaron,

There is a free AE plugin that will do the trick for you. I’ve done a similar animation move in a recent experiment here (it’s the last sequence in the film)




Elemental from Illuminated Vagabond on Vimeo.

The plugin can be found here:
https://www.subblue.com/blog/2010/6/17/little_planets

Good luck!
Paul

[Paul Nelson]

It’s full frame rate 720p out of the playback machine. Wouldn’t know where to check for VFR. Everything is set to ‘high’ or ‘full’.

Control panel is showing indeed 720p SDI in, and showing the downconvert icon to the 625i primary format. It all looks correct.

I can fire up the capture and view the process. And by watching the capture window I can either see the interlacing happening or not. If it looks progressive to me I stop/restart playback on the playout machine until I see interlacing, and then let the capture continue. This seems to work.

I have test clips that indeed show this happening… You can see the smooth progressive footage, I stop/restart the playout machine until the interlacing ‘wakes up’ and then let it rip.

It’s all a bit odd, and done my head in a bit.

Even when I send a 625i downconvert from the playback machine I’ve noticed the same phenomenon, so it seems to point to my new setup.

New Mac Pro, new kona, new OS. Who knows. Was hoping someone else may have seen the same.

Cheers for all the input.

[Paul Nelson]

Thanks for the information.

However, I’m not evaluating the quality of the capture. I’m simply determining if the captured footage is interlaced or not, which is quite easy to do with software tools. Either the footage exhibits the combing artifacts or it doesn’t. And when I can see the exact same clip captured with the exact same settings/method as being interlaced or progressive then there is inconsistency in the capture/downconvert.

Even during capture I can see visually whether it is coming in interlaced or not, and it randomly changes during capture when I stop/start the playback machine all within the same clip. So the same clip is containing both progressive and interlaced frames. To me, the SD downconvert to 625i should be coming in interlaced 100% of the time.

I was just trying to determine whether it was the card/driver as it’s a new purchase, or the capture tool of FCP that was altering what is captured. It appears to me it is the capturing machine, as when I performed the downconvert on playback out of the other kona as described, it still exhibited the same behavior.

Eventually I will try capturing through a different program (Avid) and see if there are any issues on a downconverted capture. But for now I just don’t have the time.

Cheers,
Paul

[Paul Nelson]

Thanks. I’ve sent a request into tech support.

This won’t be a frequent part of my workflow, so it isn’t crucial.

But on inspecting the footage both at 100% in FCP and in external software, quicktime/vlc/etc… it is indeed either progressive or interlaced on the same clips and same capture instead of being interlaced the entire time.

Thanks for the help guys. At least it sounds like my methods are correct.

Cheers,
Paul

[Paul Nelson]

Thanks for the help guys.

Upon further investigation I think I may have discovered a bug, or perhaps it’s a Lion/FCP/Kona combination thing. I’m running the latest Lion updates and the 10.0.1 Kona driver.

I did the following tests:

On capture machine chose easy setup for Pal 625i Pro Res 422. Opened AJA control panel to choose secondary format 720p. Played out 720p from playback machine via SDI.

I noticed the following:
While in the capture tool you can visibly see the interlacing, or in my case, sometimes not. When reviewing captured footage I’ve verified that indeed sometimes the captured footage is coming in progressively, sometimes interlaced (as I want). By stopping/starting playback on the playout 720p machine, the capture machine seems to ‘wake-up’ and digitize interlaced (or sometimes not..grrr). There seems to be no rhyme nor reason for this, as it also could continue to capture progressively. Reviewed footage shows the same. I could see within the same captured clip some parts progressive and some interlaced simply by stopping and starting playback on the 720p timeline.

I’ve also tried the other way round.

Did the downconvert on the the playout machine so that it was sending a 625i signal straight to the capture machine. I noticed the same results as above. By stopping starting the playout, the capture seems to ‘wake up’ and do interlacing.

Any further suggestions/settings/etc I should look at? Does FCP have some built in de-interlacing I’m not aware of that I need to control somehow?

I know my setup isn’t ideal as I’m running Lion and unsupported FCP and etc. But that’s how the machine came to me. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing anything obviously wrong.

Cheers,

Paul

[Paul Nelson]

Will take a look at that. We are a Mac shop, so not sure if they have a Mac version. The other option is, of course, go right to the source and use ON2’s Flix. Was just hoping not to spend more money after buying CS4 production suite. You’d think that since Adobe has taken over Flash, that their software would be a little more robust and flexible.

Thanks for the info.

[Paul Nelson]

I have been playing with AME for a couple days now with extremely frustrating results. I was hoping it would be a replacement for my current FLV workflow which is using the Quicktime Macromedia Studio 8 encoder through Cleaner 6.5.

So far my opinion is that AME is a very weak attempt at an encoding option. It probably works well enough if you are using files from Premiere, but we use Avid. AME doesn’t like the default Avid codec exports and I’ve had to create a custom export template so that AME even recognizes the video track, and you have to be sure to flag the aspect ratio because the “resize” feature is a joke. It only lets you resize according to the inherent aspect ratio. I.E. if you have an anamorphic file you CAN’T resize it in AME. It simply adds black around your video. LAME.

But you are asking about deinterlacing, which is also driving me nuts. Thus far, no matter what settings I export my QTs out of Avid, AME does NOT deinterlace the file. Or, if it is doing, it does so very, very poorly so it still looks interlaced to me. I’m still experimenting with other codec exports to see if it can deinterlace anything at all.

Over all I am less than impressed with AME. It’s speed is great, and it offers 2-pass encoding. But the options and functionality are crippling in my opinion.