[Robert Yates]

I have listed the information below. But just to note I have been using both of these projects for quite a while now, the first for over a year (on an animated feature) without this problem ever occurring and I did not change any settings recently. My suspicions lean towards it being related to Quicktime 10 and that whatever it is affects Compressor’s ability to deal with it?

Project 1:

Framesize 960×540 custom 16:9
Pixel Aspect square
Editing timebase 24
Compressor: Photo JPEG
Quality 100%
Audio 48KHz 24 bit
Media: 960×540 24 fps photo jpeg and 1920×1080 24 fps Avid DNxHD codec (scaled 50 %)

but I had the same problem with a sequence set to

Project 2:

1920×1080 HDTV 1080i (16:9)
Square
23.98
Compressor Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)
same audio settings
media – 1920×1080 23.98fps Apple ProRes 422 (HQ)

Thanks!

[Robert Yates]

Thanks again, I am very glad there are people like you who take the time, I assume for free, to respond to people like me who are struggling to get up to speed when they find they have been getting by without being up to speed or believing they were. As an aside, if anyone knows of good reference material in book form or whatever that would help me out in moving more rapidly into the HD world, and the “new world” of media as Gary put it, I would appreciate it. I hang out here, I have an account at Lynda.com and watch the tutorials and buy books and surf the web but something that would very clearly lay out the complete technical picture of HD video, perhaps one or two sources that people have found helpful but in the easiest to comprehend language possible so I do not have to go back to school for an engineering degree, would be fantastic and appreciated immensely!!

GARY ADCOCK: “OK – this one has gotten tiring for me to keep explaining.
Cameras can shoot progressive- however the SMPTE video transport stream for 1080 requires that for BROADCAST ( the format is called a progressive segmented frame) – where progressive frame are played as interlace.- this is the format.

ALL broadcast in your part of the world is at 50i – so 25 frame divided into 2 fields (ie: Segmented Frame) is actually 50i- it is a direct translation for transmission. this is the same as it is for 25p SD content. ”

ROBERT YATES REPLY: I think there is just something in the wording of this that isn’t clicking for me. and yes it shows my lack of technical knowledge in this case and nothing to do with probably how you are wording it, but by SMPTE video transport stream and broadcast you don’t mean JUST when a TV station sends it out but that any monitoring of it, even directly from FCP, will have to use the 50i format? If so, then I actually want to breathe a sigh of relief because when I do get what I am seeing in FCP to monitor out the JVC monitor flashes 1080/50i so then we should be all happy now!!!

Now here is something that I hope is resolved by your use of the words “direct translation” above but I just need to make absolutely sure I am understanding you: Because I am still being expected here at this studio to give a true 25p version to the post house to create an HDCAM SR 1080p25 archive master AND everyone is breathing down my neck to make sure (even if it is only a format that will for the time being NEVER be broadcast as is) that we can monitor it that way. Now, if what you are telling me is that is currently impossible to see straight 25p without converting on the fly to 50i with the setup we have or if what I am not understanding is that 50i IS THE ONLY WAY to monitor it and always will be the ONLY WAY, can I then say, with borrowed authority, that we have to stop looking for this method because it doesn’t exist? What I need to be able to tell everyone is that (hopefully) a 50i monitoring of it going to show me exactly the same image as if I could actually do it in 25p (direct translation)? I assume there is no loss of quality or artifacts created since the original material is progressive and that a segmented frame will not suffer from having two fields that are slightly different from one another but that the segmenting will produce two identical (though odd and even numbered) fields. If so, then I can put this issue to rest I think.

If the above is true, and if I go back to what I was asking in the beginning of this thread, where I have found that I need to set the audio/video settings in FCP to 1080i25 to get it to playout to the monitor, is this the same thing as telling it to use 25psf, which I don’t see as an option in my settings pull down menu?

Here are the settings that work for me to see the FCP output on the monitor:

If I change the audio/video setting in FCP to 1080p25 I get a garbled image on the monitor. But if I keep it 1080i25 it plays fine. I have noticed that if I quickly switch to the AJA control panel when playing out that it is actually using 1080i25 and switches back to 1080p25 when FCP stops using it. Also just to note, we are going out of the card to the monitor via Component not SDI. And the monitor flashes onscreen info that it is receiving a 1080i50 signal when it plays back correctly. I’m sure this is all pointing to the fact that I am only going to be able to monitor it as 50i. And I’m too thick to get it and stressed out by the fact that everyone else around me is starting to freak out about things not showing up as 1080p25 in all our settings!!!

Thanks!

[Robert Yates]

Wow, um, okay. Bye…but before you go I WANTED to say thanks for your input but that last post was pretty harsh.

Basically, I WILL be hired back because I have been upfront about my limited technical experience with HD and the choices to deal with the material in this manner were not mine to make. I am being asked to make the choices fit into the reality of dealing with the software and hardware we have at our disposal.

Before I ever came into the picture it had been decided that a 1080p25 MASTER on HDCAM SR would be produced. I won’t even be actually delivering this myself, I will be supplying the post house with QT outputs of my final edits of each episode which they will ingest on their end and lay back to tape etc. They will also be creating two other (broadcast) MASTER versions (the 1080p25 being the not-to-be-broadcast archive master) consisting of one HD SR 50i and HD SR 59.97i for our two different broadcasters. Again, I did not have a say in this workflow. I’m not trying to pass the buck here but I’m trying to deal with what I have been given (and hopefully learn a hell of a lot from the experience).

As for other technical decisions, again, in my personal work experience I have never had to deal with much of this decision making nor even bugs in hardware and software during productions. Perhaps I have been lucky, or shielded or pampered (to my detriment) but I am trying hard now to make up for it and not sure why I should be made to feel that I should give up and/or be fired. Perhaps I have misunderstood the purpose of these forums. I thought they were here to ask questions, get input, advice or even knowledge and get constructively corrected sometimes. If not, well, ignore me and don’t bother feeling obligated to try to deal with me and get angry about it. Or maybe, because of the nature of internet communication, you aren’t angry and I’m simply interpreting it that way, in which case, I apologize for such an intepretation.

As for the Avid comparison, again, the last show I did was most definitely edited using the Avid DnX format, and no technical issues arose. BUT it was interlaced HD and no one was asking me to deal with this rarer format and figure out why the AJA card and the monitor seem not to want to play it back even when all settings are set to 1080p25 and the documentation supplied with both states that 1080p25 playback is possible. THAT was my original issue. I am learning a lot from trying to solve it, more than I thought I would or needed to but that’s good from my POV. I was just hoping someone would say emphatically, backed up by experience, that one or the other of these pieces of hardware would not allow me to monitor a true 1080p25 without a conversion to 50i or that as long as the FCP settings were set to the progressive settings that my monitor would at least give me an almost perfect approximation of (or 100 percent perfect) monitored output of what the final show will look like in a perfect world. That is what I am being asked to be responsible for, that’s what I am trying to grapple with.

As for the compression issues, thanks for the input! Seriously! I am EXTREMELY thankful that you called me on this. I was using NONE merely to get it to me as lossless as possible but if Maya is capable of a more edit-friendly and pretty much lossless format, I am more than happy to go with it. But we have been told that we WILL NOT be able to request the Apple ProRes 422 HQ codec (I have since found out there is even another intermediate step taking place between Maya and my receiving of the material using a software called Harmony). If time permits, and it should, I will probably end up transcoding whatever they give me to the ProRes 422 format anyway at night when I’m not here. Thank you as well for the advice on the color space. I will make sure someone who was making such decisions before I arrived has already made this choice properly.

[Robert Yates]

[Robert Yates] “Because the material was NOT shot in a camera but produced through a variety of software,”

[Gary Adcock]OK wish this was stated in one of your earlier posts. this is the first part of your problem. it is NOT VIDEO
it is animation- and often the rules are different between the delivery of the 2 formats.

REPLY: Thanks for your help. Just want to point out I did mention this in my very first post when I started this topic. I emphasized it here because no one seemed to be referring to it directly and I suspected we were dealing with 2 different approaches.

[Robert Yates] “We are forcing the software to give us files that are full raster, 1920×1080 25fps, progressive (or at least we hope,”
[Gary Adcock] How? Uncompressed, ProRes or photojpeg?

REPLY: None, as in the codec is set to “None”. We are in the very early stages of receiving test material but the work so far is being done on PCs so we believe that None is our best option at this point. Wrong? I know this means render or transcoding on my end but the studio is not being very accommodating in this respect, in helping us perhaps install other codecs so we can find a better compatible format, etc.

[Robert Yates], so far FCP is telling me they have upper field dominance but we haven’t found where this might be happening in the pipeline)”

[Gary Adcock] AS said before- your this is an issue with your delivery format- if you had ever bothered to check the specs for the format you are working in you would have found out that it is delivered as a Progressive Segmented Frame and that is A SMPTE REQUIREMENT for delivery of 1080 content for broadcast.

REPLY: I’m not sure I follow. The delivery format is 1080i25 and our coproducers have asked for 1080p25 master as well. We will be delivering our final material as EDL and Quicktime media to a post house and they will create our master and our broadcast master so for me I would like the flexibility to see it monitored here as progressive and psf and/or interlaced so we will know what we will be getting, obviously. I know that these two formats for delivery are different and would require some transcoding but not sure how this actually fits into my question about how to get the 1080p25 to the monitor without some sort of conversion happening. Again, I’m absolutely willing to believe this stems from some part of my understanding of HD/formats etc not being up to snuff. Which is why I’m both here looking for anecdotal advice and plowing through/devouring tutorials and manuals as we speak!

[Gary Adcock] The Current LHE drivers allow for 1080 as true P. The Kona 3 and IoHD also allow for direct playback of the VERY RARE true progressive playback in 1080. ( currently only the RED and Phantom cameras are working with this format) The issue was you said you were not skilled enough to create a custom setup for this custom format.

REPLY: Did I say that? Maybe it was implied. But now that I’ve been working on this problem for over a week now I can restate by saying that no Easy Setup was available to me with the AJA Kona appendage in 1080p25 so I customized the setup but wasn’t 100 percent certain it was acceptable the way I’d done it. After doing so it gave either an out of range error on the monitor or gave a garbled image unless I changed Video Playback to 1080i25. I believe that all my settings on the FCP side of things are now fine for true 1080p but getting the monitor to display it properly is my issue. In my AJA control panel I have set it to 1080p25.

[Robert Yates]”But when we monitor this in FCP we see a flickering of the finer detail lines.”
[Gary Adcock] On a computer or SD monitor -yes you will see this moire unless you are playing back the content at full rez on a compatible HD screen.

REPLY: Both on the computer monitor and our HD monitor.

[Robert Yates]” We are trying to determine if this is showing up because of some aspect of our footage or monitoring being interlaced, and whether it would disappear if we could monitor it progressively (or even if it is simply a restriction of how thin a line can be in animation even in full HD”

[Gary Adcock]OF course there are limits to the amount of detail that can be shown. IF you are having this issue in HD you are in for a NIGHTMARE when you release on the web or as SD since both of those formats are released with considerably less rez than a master HD file.

REPLY: Which is what I suspected but wanted to hear others say it so I can say to my superiors that the community at large knows this to be true. So, thanks for backing me up on this!

[Robert Yates] “I think there is something I am not quite wrapping my head around here when it comes to interlaced/progressive”

[Gary Adcock] -720p is ALWAYS progressive at both capture and playback. Playback is ALWAYS at 50p or 60p.
-1080 can be captured as Progressive or interlace- the playback is always as Progressive Segmented Frame or as interlace.

Content NOT created in a computer needs to fit into one of these areas- usually by force.

REPLY – Okay, but this content WAS created on a computer, so it does not fit into one of these areas? Or is it because it was created there that it becomes a problem and needs to then be forced to fit into one of these areas? And in reference to what you said above about the Aja cards, with the LHe it will be impossible to get the monitor to play it back as 1080p25? Again, I feel like I’m missing some little bit of info/understanding that would make this all click for me!

[Gary Adcock]lastly

Since this as not come up yet, what about the RGB to YUV colorspace conversion of your files?

REPLY – Funny you should mention this, I was actually in the process of beginning to look into this yesterday but was trying to solve one problem at a time. This is something I really DO NOT understand, other than in very basic terms. I don’t even know how to phrase a decent question about it which is why I was trying to find someone else already explaining it out there on the net. I should assume that the files I am receiving have been created in the RGB colorspace? And if so, I have to tell FCP to use the 10bit YUV for processing? Or is there another stage to getting it right?
BTW, I really appreciate this. Without getting too deep into my background, I was basically an offline editor for the bulk of my career so far, pretty much in SD with teams that handled everything other than actual editing for me and only recently have I found myself being asked to do more online work…and to do much of this often without technical directors and support. So I’m trying my best to get up to speed, desperately, so that, basically, I do not find myself unemployed!!!

[Robert Yates]

Thanks everyone for helping me clarify this issue and in helping me go even beyond my current problem and understand other subtlties about HD and FCP in general. I have a few more questions for anyone who has the time or has worked as I am about to describe below:

Because the material was NOT shot in a camera but produced through a variety of software, the final product coming from the animation software Maya (this is an animated series), we are not dealing with anything a camera does in terms of compression, square or non square pixels, etc. We are forcing the software to give us files that are full raster, 1920×1080 25fps, progressive (or at least we hope, so far FCP is telling me they have upper field dominance but we haven’t found where this might be happening in the pipeline).

1. I keep reading that I can tell FCP to set the field dominance to “None” for individual clips (I know how to do this but I have a question about what it is actually doing). If there was field dominance in the image as received, does this truly create a non-interlaced, progressive frame from something that was interlaced? Will motion artifacts show up still as the fields are put together as one whole frame?

2. In a related question: Is it possible for a still image to have field dominance? I ask because I was given one big still (6410×3606, Field Dom: NONE, Square pixels) that I imported into Motion and pan and zoomed around on. I then exported as a Quicktime, Apple ProRes 422 HQ, 1080p25 with field dominance set to None. But when we monitor this in FCP we see a flickering of the finer detail lines. Is this a limitation of how large a pixel is even in HD or does this point to interlacing somewhere in the chain even if only at the monitoring stage as described above and below?

2. Our biggest concern are thin, black lines that seem to flicker when there is movement in the frame, pans, zooms etc. The black lines are details in the sets or characters as drawn by the artists. We are trying to determine if this is showing up because of some aspect of our footage or monitoring being interlaced, and whether it would disappear if we could monitor it progressively (or even if it is simply a restriction of how thin a line can be in animation even in full HD…something I think we are all beginning to suspect might be the culprit but need to eliminate this whole doubt about interlacing first). If I am working in a 1080p25 project with None as field dominance and I can only get it to play out to our JVC HD monitor when the Video Playback is set to 1080i25 can I be confident that any flickering I see on the monitor will also exist in a purely progressive environment (as if the monitor was accepting the 1080p25 signal)? I understand that this show, whether edited natively as progressive or not will be broadcast interlaced but we are being asked for 25p masters too by our co-producers and need to be certain that this kind of line flickering is not present on those masters.

I think there is something I am not quite wrapping my head around here when it comes to interlaced/progressive, what FCP/AJA Kona are doing as it goes to the monitor and if my animated footage should even have any interlacing issues with it in the first place! Other animated programs on which I have worked didn’t have any thin line issues so this problem never surfaced and is my first time encountering it/trying to help everyone deal with it. Hopefully, even if in the end someone can 100 percent reassure me that what I am seeing on the monitor is the progressive version of what I am editing in FCP and that the flickering has nothing to do with progressive versus interlaced, that I will have learned a heck of a lot about this whole process!!!

[Robert Yates]

Thanks again!!!

[Robert Yates]

Thanks a million! We’re still working with our tech people to see if we can’t get FCP/AJA card and the monitor to accept a truly 1080p25 signal but if what you said holds, then I guess we don’t have much to worry about. Still, those who will be approving the shows will obviously want to know that what they are seeing is interlaced or progressive absolutely 🙂 So we still have to have the proof that it is. This will definitely help make our case more believable,
Thanks again!

[Robert Yates]

Thanks yet again!

To clarify: so if I have my sequence set up correctly, the AJA control panel setting of 1080i25 will still display a progressive image?

Does this mean that the video playback setting in FCP is overriding the control panel setting? Or do the two need to match to know that I am truly monitoring interlace or progressive?

Also, you mention square pixels. I was under the impression that HD was square pixels but I just watched a tutorial that states the complete opposite, that they are rectangular. If I am being given shot (not shot with any camera but created in Maya for an animated series) with an HD frame size but square pixels, will be problems down the road when I get to onlining and outputting this to a deliverable format such as HDCAM SR?

[Robert Yates]

Thanks! So in the AJA control panel does it matter if I set it to output 1080p25 or 1080i25 as long as my FCP sequence setting is as progressive as I can get it (FIELD DOMINANCE: NONE)?

And I’m not sure if this matters, but my aspect ratio in my sequence settings always says HDTV 1080i (16:9)? Will this affect whether not it will be a truly progressive output on my monitor?

[Robert Yates]

Thanks Rafael! I’ll look into that!

Also, after posting the above questions, I finally found a document from AJA that lists the supported video formats of this card and 1080p25 is not in that list…but…oddly, I found another document that does list it as a supported video format so I am not sure which is in error at this point other than I don’t seem to be able to get the monitor to accept a forced attempt to make FCP Video Playback 1080p25. I get an “Out of Range” message on the JVC monitor.