[Savail]

Rafael,

I tested a straight .dv export after applying the Nattress filter and changing the compressor in the sequence settings to both DVCPRO 50 and 8 bit uncompressed, but noticed no difference in quality. If my original captured format is .dv, why would changing the compressor in the sequence settings affect the quality of the image? Shouldn’t I try to match those settings with the source? I will also email Graeme as you suggested about the filter part of this equation.

[Savail]

Rafalaos,

I tested a straight .dv export after applying the Nattress filter and changing the compressor in the sequence settings to both DVCPRO 50 and 8 bit uncompressed, but noticed no difference in quality. If my original captured format is .dv, why would changing the compressor in the sequence settings affect the quality of the image? Shouldn’t I try to match those settings with the source? I will also email Graeme as you suggested about the filter part of this equation.

[Savail]

Thanks so much Rafael, and my apologies for taking so long to reply to your advice.

We were indeed watching this footage on LCD monitors, and finally had a chance to preview it on both a computer CRT monitor and a standard TV broadcast monitor with the same results – the interlace lines were gone.

We also took your advice and did some tests from Compressor in which we compared the same frame of video between a .dv NTSC clip, the same clip converted to PAL .dv (with the Nattress plugin), and an MPEG-2 version of the latter created in Compressor. We found the interlace lines actually appearing following the Nattress PAL conversion, which were of course made worse following the MPEG-2 compression of that converted clip. Why would that be? I thought those lines would have appeared in the original NTSC .dv capture, which is usually interlaced, right?

Furthermore, we actually found that when we simply created a PAL sequence in FCP and rendered our .dv clips to the timeline before exporting as PAL .dv, we got better results across the board – the interlace lines were gone, and did not appear on an LCD monitor nor on a standard TV set. Given that so many people have testified to the Nattress plugin over this cruder method for converting from NTSC to PAL, I am wondering if there is something I am misunderstanding here. Any light you could shed on this would be appreciated.