Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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Also, I want to stress that I’m not being some snob over picture quality or anything like that. “Jaggies” are absolutely nasty. Anyone will notice them.
Sean
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I’ve been doing alot of reading on this subject. This here more than anything explains it:
https://neuron2.net/library/filmsequence.pdf
I hate going into serious technical talk on the “Creative” Cow, but this is something very important I think people need to understand especially since interlaced displays (tube TVs and monitors) are becoming a thing of the past. I honestly wish I knew about this stuff last week.
Ramona, yes the 1080i60 footage is from material that had 3:2 pulldown applied. There were many different sources from the project. Some was 1080i60 w/ pulldown, some was 1080i60 w/o pulldown. Some of it was NTSC DV50, also with 3:2 pulldown.
To make matters even worse, some of it was 720p60 Varicam. This footage was shot at 24p but contained redundant frames making it 60p (sort of like 3:2 pulldown but w/o the interlacing).
If I could have, I would have converted all source material to one 24p format prior to any editing. But I wasn’t able to. I working from two other editor’s projects and was using the masters they made. The masters were 1080i60 with what’s known as “bad edits” – meaning they didn’t edit at 24p while they probably should have.
There’s other issues as well. It’s all very, very confusing. Yes, using a Kona I’m sure I could recapture each source tape and take it all in at 24 fps if I had their original projects – which I couldn’t get for reasons I won’t get into (one was on an Avid DS 3000 miles away).
The problem is, if a piece containing 3:2 pulldown has already been edited at 60i (be it NTSC or 1080i60), and then it was mastered to tape, and you only have acces to that tape – you’re kind of screwed. The pulldown order, or cadance (I believe I’m using that term correctly) pretty much gets destroyed since it changes at every edit point. Mixing in different kinds of footage after the fact makes it even worse. That’s the situation I’m in (by no fault of my own).
So there are only two ways to correct this. One is for a human being to actually go through and isolate each edit point that the other editor originally made. And then do a reverse telecine of each one (using Cinema Tools or recapturing at 24p using the Kona). In this particular case, it would take weeks to do that.
The other method is to use a highly advanced reverse telecine system, like Teranex or Algolith. These systems analyze every pixel to match the fields back together while detecting different kinds of pulldown used – even if more than one kind is present. Algolith takes one hour to render one second of video. Teranex can do it in real-time, which is why it’s so expensive.
Sean
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Thanks guys. But I think a lot of people are confused about the meaning of a quality upconvert. “Upconvert” means a process that involves not just scaling, but also deinterlacing. And according to Walter’s post, the Kona cannot an advanced reverse-telecine – as I expected.
To give you an example, I’m using the Algolith After Effects plugin to convert a 5 minute sequence from 1080i60 to 1080Psf24. This plugin does indeed do what the Teranex does. The 5 minute piece is going to take 45 hours to render. I emailed Algolith and they confirmed this is normal. That’s how intense this process is, and it’s why Terenex systems cost tens of thousands of dollars. So you understand why I was skeptical to hear that a $2000 capture card with a throw-in feature of upconversion could accomplish the same thing.
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Thanks, that explains it.
Sean
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There is no other reason except maybe the AR of the preview window during capture.
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You must have changed your Audio Video Settings. The Blackmagic 10-bit Easy Setup will not have digitizer set to off.
You can always re-install the Blackmagic drivers to restore the default Easy Setups and AV settings.
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There is no difference if you do it before or after capture. It doesn’t affect the media whatsoever. “Flagging it” as anamorphic doesn’t mean much anyway. It’s a convienience. All it does is apply settings to the motion tab (Distort) when you drag it into a timeline. You can apply those settings manually and it’s no different than having checked the anamorphic box.
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The professional choice of the 90’s was a Kennsington trackball. Now, the pro choice seems to be tablets.
I’m still stuck in the 90’s – I love my trackball, especially the new optical one.
For the left hand, my secret weapon is the Belkin Nostromo:
https://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Product_Id=157024
You can program the wheel to zoom in and out of the FCP timeline. That alone makes it the greatest thing since sliced bread. The other keys I have set to do common things like copy, cut, paste, swith to all the tools, etc. Three shift states so you can cover the whole keyboard if you want. I even have macros to multi-step commands with a single keystroke (such as “select all from here” in timeliene). No other piece of software or hardware has created such a drastic speed increase for me.
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Use the Blackmagic Easy Setup for NTSC – DV. It creates 480 files.
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Yes. And to be thorough, you don’t NEED to buy Lumiere (which seems like it’s dead since FCP 5 now supports HDV natively). There is a way to do it for free. The Apple Firewire SDK (free download from Apple) contains a little program called “DVHSCap” which is pretty easy to use and lets you copy to and from a DVHS deck. But encoding a proper TS file that actually works was not so easy. So I went ahead and bought Lumiere and that worked fine. Just be aware that there is a way to do it for free, I just couldn’t figure out how.
Sean