Video Format Resources?

Now that my first film is done, I've decided to dedicate the rest of my life to understanding the arcane business of video formats. Here's what inspired this:
--I pulled some footage (public domain) off a dvd. It was 29.97
--In FCP 6 on my Mac PPC G5 this played with those added frames. ABCDDEFGHH etc.
--In Cinema Tools the same clip played with interlaced images (and oddly stretched wider)
--I was able to de-interlace by placing the play-head on a B frame an using the F1F2 and A1A2 settings.
--the result was a dandy 23.98 clip with no interlacing or repeat frames.
--Brought this into FCP (a 23.98 setting) and it plays great.
--Tried the exact same process on another clip from the same file and it didn't work. The clip stll had interlaced frames.

So I want to become an expert in this area. Can anyone recommend a good book on the subject. perhaps some monastery in northern Italy dedicated to the study of field dominance?

DK

>I was able to de-interlace by placing the play-head on a B frame an using the F1F2 and
>A1A2 settings.

What's the F1F2 and A1A2 setting?

I hardly work with Cinema Tools on the work i'm doing (and i'm in PAL 99% of the time). By de-interlacing it into 23.98, it means that the software (cinema tools) recognized the pulldown pattern used to convert the original 23.98 frame rate into interlaced 29.97fps, and by reversing the pulldown pattern, you get back the 23.98 frames.

When it didn't work on your second clip, the clip was either shot natively on 29.97 or a different pulldown pattern was used.

You can check out the Apple Certified training line of books. Some of them have pretty good information on this. How important is this in the apple test though? I'm curious, coz I'm still aiming to go for a level 1 test and I've never used cinema tools or pulldown patterns before (PAL only requires speeding up/slowing down of 2%)

Dale Kutzera Wrote:
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> I've decided to
> dedicate the rest of my life to understanding the
> arcane business of video formats.

Due to all of the formats out there and the continually expanding nature of technology, I think it'll take that long to do so!

Additionally, at least from my perspective, I think that most of us would like to master this area too.

I started on my journey to discovering FCP, first through trying to figure out how to convert a so-and-so video to a so-and-so format. In fact, I earned a sticky post on a Palm TREO users site because of what I wrote up with regards to converting videos to TREO phones.

I'm sorry that I don't have any recommendations at this point but since I am also interested in learning about video formats, I am "subscribing" to this thread by posting here. If I discover any good books or pages, I'll post them here.

--
Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
---------------------------------
[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

I think there is a precious tiny handful of LAFCPUG'ers that can consider themselves "experts" in this area. I am not one of them. I constantly run into fielding issues and you can hear me cursing all the way down the hall when it happens. I just roll with it & work with each clip one at a time. I enjoy troubleshooting & discovering resolutions (I'm a big fat geek that way).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

A good video compressionist should help you in your area. Northen Italy? Most of the pulldown patterns are associated with North America and Japan (NTSC 29.97 frame rates). You should do better finding a monastery in LA.

Fields and interlacing and all that jazz was a technical work-around when video got started in the 1930's. They couldn't figure out a way back then to broadcast full progressive frames as were projected by film in a cinema. In a rush to get the new product to market, they comprimised quality for quantity, and the basic technology stuck. Differing broadcast standards emerged based upon it, thus multiplying the basic flaw, which started a long dark history of format wars and made life way too complicated for generations to come. If you want to spend time in an Italian monastery reading up on it, you might actually find some ancient illuminated manuscripts on the subject, including for example Leonardo da Vinci's original design for a camera.

Otherwise, the internet is your friend. Maybe this idea works better: find an Italian monastery with wlan (hey, here's one; the Monastero San Biagio in Assisi), take your laptop with you, and start learning about 4:4:4 digital negatives, the cameras that record them, and the new delivery and projection technologies. That's the Holy Grail. Unless of course you'd rather study video and thus become an historian in which case the nearest Starbucks with a wlan will do.


Clay

What we need is a "cookbook" for video editors and graphic artists. I have no idea if something like this exists but the first person to get something like this published will undoubtedly make a pile of money. I've been looking for a similar resource for video encoded specifically for the web and internet/ftp delivery. Problem being, the technology seems to change so fast that a dead-tree version would be out of date before it got to the bookstore shelves. What we need is a wiki on the subject. My $.02...

Funny you should call it that. Check this from Phillip Hodgetts.

Simple Encoding Recipes for the Web

In Cinema Tools, the Reverse Telecine options box provides for:

Capture Mode: Field 1 Only, Field 2 only, Field 1-Field 2, Field 2 - Field 1

Fields: Style 1 or 2, A1A2, B1B2, B3C1, C2D1, D2D3 (no R2D2 though)

So far I've used trial and error with this feature, but I want to learn more. The frustration is when one setting set works for one clip, but doesn't for another clip from the same source.

DK
www.militaryintelligenceandyou.com

Here's a good page I found:

[lipas.uwasa.fi]

Of course google and wikipedia are always good friends (at least when it comes to technical stuff!)

--
Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
---------------------------------
[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

[codecs.onerivermedia.com]

--
Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
---------------------------------
[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

Mark had a good page there! Only issue is that the ProRes codecs aren't tested yet.

Nattress had a very good article on chroma subsampling too.