[Tom Brooks]

Disk Warrior is always a good bet, too. Quick and easy. Worth a try before more drastic measures, but usually a media drive will show signs of major file system corruption rather than mysterious things like you described.

[Tom Brooks]

Can’t really tell without seeing it, Bill. I don’t see a glaring problem with your method. Maybe you could post a few seconds of the offending video.

[Tom Brooks]

You’re losing me a little in combining references to the DVX-100A and the HVX. My understanding is that your current project is on the DVX-100A, which means it’s DV. Those sequence settings would be correct for material captured from DV 24pA source with pulldown removed. You can export a 23.98 Quicktime file from that sequence in the DV codec–no pulldown added. Whether the motion looks good to you in that file is mostly dependent on how you handled camera motion at the shoot and, of course, it’s subject to your taste.

You would not want to export Quicktime Conversion to DVCProHD 24p from that sequence. That would up-convert your footage and you’d need to use Compressor to do that.

Correct me if I misunderstand your intent.
– T

[Tom Brooks]

[Billy Morocco] “But the quicktime files stuttered A LOT. is there something I am missing? “

Not that I’m seeing. But 24p has limitations to what you can live with in terms of certain types of camera motion. Pans can look stuttery if they’re too fast. Could it be that? I would also stay away from faster shutter speeds and I’ve suspected but never really confirmed that flickery light sources like mercury or sodium vapor can yield a bad look on 24p.

[Tom Brooks]

[Billy Morocco] “Now I needed to get this out for QT deliverable (did not know that when I started, – was for a wknd contest).

I’ve used the HVX at 23.98 and thought I’d just export. But that, clearly, didn’t work. So to ADD BACK the pulldown… “

For a Quicktime deliverable, I’d normally keep it 23.98 unless the client or playback engineer requests otherwise. When you do need to output to tape with pulldown added back in, FCP will do that for you via the Firewire output. Pulldown pattern is set in System Settings/Playback control. For final playback from tape the correct pattern is 2:3:2:3. That brings up your other question:

[Billy Morocco] “or the future: is it in fact OKAY to just import the 24pA footage at 29.97, and edit away? I could see the duped frames so convinced everyone that we HAD to do the pulldown. “

No, that’s not OK because the 24pA footage uses the 2:3:3:2 pulldown pattern. That pattern does not look normal for playback. It’s intended to be removed for the edit. Upon output, the normal 2:3:2:3 pattern is added back in. You did right to remove advanced pulldown for the edit.

Look for this section in the FCP manual:
Using an AG-DVX100 NTSC Camcorder
with Advanced Pull-Down

[Tom Brooks]

Hey David, I feel your pain. I think you’re doing the responsible thing to talk about it. Pany knows they are in a world with an internet and their service will need to stand up to criticism. I probably bought my Pro Plasma partly based on your previous review. It went kaput a few months ago and had to be sent to a shop. I called the 800 number in my warranty booklet and got reasonable direction from Panasonic. Our local authorized shop picked it up and fixed it in fairly short order. These monitors are touchy assemblies with rows of tiny contacts along the edges. One part of the display went bad after the initial repair. The shop took it back and fixed it again. This time all the way. They also retouched the big scratch they made on the base the first time around. It made me nervous to trust my monitor to a local shop, but I was satisfied with the result.

[Tom Brooks]

[Glenn Kenny] “In the end any display will interpret the psf signal as progressive, since that is what it is. It may (if it is a CRT) display it as odd/even lines, but it is still progressive, with no temporal difference between the odd/even lines. If the signal is interlace, the display will, if it is a CRT, display it as interlace, since that is what it is. There could be a temporal difference between the odd/even lines because of this, depending on the content (still or motion). If it is a more modern display, it will most likely display it as progressive in either case, by de-interlacing and scaling to fill the display. The means and methods of that process is very dependent on the make/model of the display, so the look can vary greatly with the same content.”

Glenn,
Thanks for your explanation. It gets into an area that I’ve often found difficult to get my head around and to collect all the facts surrounding it. I understand that PsF was developed in part to reduce the bandwidth of transmission of progressive material. By squirting out only half of the image at a time, the pipe transporting it can be smaller. If the whole frame squirts out at once, even though the total amount of data is the same in the end, that big squirt requires a fatter pipe.

Another thing that seems often overlooked is that truly interlaced transmission is displayed by interlaced devices (such as a ten-year-old Sony PVM monitor) as a constant stream of interlaced fields. These devices can’t do any sort of 2:2 pulldown, frame buffering, or deinterlacing. Unless I’m mistaken, they simply display fields as they get them. The result is interlace “artifacts” in all cases. When the transmission is i59 all of the fields have a temporal difference. When the transmission is p29 (please forgive the shorthand) every third field will have a temporal difference from the one it is interlaced with. Hence, the artifacts, which are readily seen when I play p29 material through my Kona card to a CRT monitor.
– Tom

[Tom Brooks]

Hi Lora,
I don’t think ProRes will make the difference you’re looking for. It’s a great way to go with FCP in general though, because it’s optimized for RT, it’s 10-bit, and the file sizes are smaller.

The more I think about it, your workflow really isn’t likely to be the majority of the problem, since Animation is a lossless codec, albeit a somewhat old-school one. For example, the recompression that occurs in Quicktime Conversion should not be noticeable with a lossless codec.

I can only suggest a few things to try. One is to check on the field rendering in AE. I’d probably go with field rendering on and upper first. You might also check on things like Motion Blur in AE or even experimenting with a little blur on the offending objects. A little blur can settle down that shimmer.

You might also try a custom encoding preset in Compressor. Some material does better with a fairly high constant bitrate. So create a preset with 7Mbps CBR and see if it helps.
-Tom

[Tom Brooks]

[Lora Probert] “Each scene is exported as:
Best Quality
Full Resolution
Codec Compression: Animation
“

It may be a matter of semantics, but you should use the Render Queue, not Export. I would consider ProRes 422 to be a better choice for the Final Cut part of your workflow. Animation is a somewhat outmoded 8-bit codec. You can also choose to render fields out of After Effects. Set that to Upper First in Render Settings. If your entire sequence is 1080 at 29.97, I see no advantage to rendering without fields.

[Lora Probert] “Exported from FCP (rendered timeline) as:
Quicktime Conversion
Compression: Animation
Millions of Colors, Best “

Don’t use Quicktime Conversion. Export Quicktime Movie, Same as Source.

[Lora Probert] “And finally, it’s burned to DVD via DVD Studio Pro, encoding settings are the same except for Field Order “Top” is selected to match my original animation and timeline Field Dominance settings in FCP. Not sure if this makes a difference at this point or not.
“

As long as you imported m2v and AC-3 audio into DVD Studio Pro and put those assets on your timeline, then the encoding settings in DVDSP will only apply to items that are not encoded, such as motion menus chosen within DVDSP.

In addition to those various corrections, you didn’t say why you’re working in 1080 when your output is SD DVD. Some of the shimmer might be caused by very fine lines which are becoming finer yet in the down-scaling from HD to SD.

[Tom Brooks]

[Bouke Vahl] “Now moving images shot interlaced look horrible on a progressive monitor, and especially when you freeze frame it. “

Does it really look so horrible? I watch it all the time on my LCD TV at home. True, almost all of it is pure garbage, and maybe I’m conditioned to accept it, but I don’t perceive artifacts (or call it crappy deinterlacing if you will) when I watch NBC. The TV, which displays progressive images, combines the fields in a way that is…acceptable. Does anyone watch TV on a CRT anymore?

Why do we have so many formats, anyway? If the US broadcasts in i59 or p59 and Europe broadcasts in i50 and movies are p24, why all these p30 variations? It’s interesting to see that some of you use them a lot, even for broadcast.