[Stephenz]

Hey Chris,

lotta questions there. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I’ll shed what light I know on the subject.

1. Yes the i stands for interlaced. 23.98 is interlaced or progressive and does not necessarily mean the footage is progressive. As soon as you went from film to HDCAM, the footage was probably interlaced, unless whoever did the transfer made sure it was progressive and even then because it was on an HDcam tape and the DVcam, it was ‘interlaced’ for sure and running at 29.97fps.

Now here’s the strange thing, all video formats, progressive or interlaced are in fact interlaced. Meaning, the image is split up into two different fields.

Your NTSC monitor will always show the image interlaced, it has no other choice. The only way to view progressive image is on a progressive plasma TV (or LCD like a computer monitor) that is playing from a progressive DVD player. (or watching a film)

When a progressive image get’s interlaced, it goes through a process called a pull-down pattern, where one picture is broken up into two different fields (half a picture) and then spread out to 29.97 frames a second.

I put together a web page to help go through all this mess….

https://www.mandarinpictures.com/stephenzinn/

It deals more with shooting 24p on a DV camera than HD, but the principles are still the same.

If you are going back out to film, then whoever you give your footage to to make the transfer will convert your interlaced video into progressive pictures. The important thing for you is not to switch back and forth between interlaced and progressive. You should edit in a progressive sequence, and if your HDCAM footage was changed to interlaced, you should be able to convert it back to progressive using CinemaTools (comes with FCP).

Read the webpage I put together and then come back with further questions.

As for the Animation codec export being a smaller filesize…
First thing to check is if you exported as a self-contained movie both times.
Second thing… you may not have lost quality, it all depends on what your initial footage was in, which was DVcam. Going from DVcam to either uncompressed or to animation will not give you any difference in quality. You can only go down in quality and not increase quality. You went down in quality when you went first from 35mm to HDcam, then from HDcam to DVcam.

When you watched the FCPexported QT and it popped up a 720×486 window… I’m assuming you are watching the exported footage on an HD monitor? Otherwise, the monitor has no choice but to display in 720i.

So much of this depends on your final footage. Either you will give an edit decision list to a film cutter to cut the film, or you will export out to HD and expose new film to the HD.

I suggested Joe’s Field Blender for the credits because it helps to get rid of some of the jiggers on credits. It treats the credits more as independant pictures rather than two fields.

Hope this helped some.

[Stephenz]

Joe’s Field Blender
https://www.joesfilters.com/joesfieldblender.php
placed on the credits has worked for me… not sure what the quality would look like on HD, but it may be worth a shot.