Deinterlacing

Ever since Snow Leopard I've not been able to de-interlace Quicktime Pro-wise as I could with Leopard. What are the settings for de-interlacing HDV directly from FCP7. Or any other ideas? This is to drop onto iDVD in a movie where deaf people are signing fast. Thanks, CR

Could you maybe elaborate a little? There are several different ways to deinterlace, depending on what you're starting with and what you're trying to deliver.

One thing that jumps out at me, though, is the fact that you don't need to, and in fact shouldn't, deinterlace before laying off on DVD.

Jeff - can you expound on why you shouldn't de-interlace before laying off on DVD?

I'm having an interlacing problem today. I sent my project to Color, and the material that came back has a lot of interlacing problems when I playback in FCP. My source footage is HDV1080i60, and I'm burning a standard def DVD for the client's final screeners.

Will the down-convert to MPEG fix the interlacing issue? Or am I barking up the wrong tree, and should go back to Color to find a solution?

You basically shouldn't deinterlace unless you're doing final delivery via the Web. (Film out is, of course, the big exception to that rule.)

Remember that 60i (or 50i for our friends in PAListan) is the native format for television. If you made the choice to originate in 60i, then your intention is clearly to deliver in 60i for broadcast. Deinterlacing because you don't like to see combing on your computer screen (hint: it belongs there; it's important) will just leave you in the position of having to re-interlace later for broadcast delivery, and that re-interlacing will happen very badly.

Making screeners for clients is always a tricky business. On the one hand, you want it to look as good as possible, so your client can be happy without having to use his imagination. But on the other hand, every minute you spend diddling with a screener is a minute wasted. So you have to strike that balance.

Run your show through Compressor on the "best" DVD setting for whatever your runtime is. Then watch the resulting DVD on your television ? not a computer, your television. Decide then if the results are acceptable. They probably will be. It's just a screener, after all.

Thanks for the quick response. I'm going to give that a try and see how it looks on a consumer DVD player and TV.

What bugs me is the interlacing issues on my edit monitor, which is a consumer HDTV being fed by a Matrox MXO LE. If the source footage was HDV 1080i60, and I worked natively in 1080i60, sent it to Color that way, and it came back that way, why is there only a banding problem with the footage that came back from Color? I wasn't having interlacing problems before it went to Color, so I'm curious why it would happen after.

Can you post a still, please? When you refer to interlacing, I get a very specific picture in my head, and that might not be what you're talking about.

Head... meet desk.

The problem is gone now. I just finished rendering out some graphics, and went back to the stretch of high-motion shots that was giving me fits to pull a still, and it's now gone. Everything looks fine.

I was getting that banding/bars effect on all the moving edges, and now it's completely disappeared. I even did a test and dropped a 'de-interlace' filter onto one of them, and the problem vanished completely.

I did notice that the shots that came back from Color (where the problems are) had a green band above them in the timeline. Maybe it was just a real time/throughput based issue, that rendering solved?

If it comes back, I'll post a still for your thoughts. Thanks!

I seem to remember going through Ripple Training's DVD Color Tutorial (the first version) and I remember it saying that when you add a Color Preset, that it wouldn't apply the effect to interlaced like it would progressive footage.

I think you had to do an extra sten if it was interlaced footage.

Don't know about the latest version of Color and if that was corrected.

i use Color v1 and it was not built to grade interlaced footage. It was meant for progressive footage at its core.

I once tried to cc interlaced footage. It looked ok on the web but on dvd it was crapola in a tube or lcd. Some of the backs that i took from 15% to 0 had fuzzy ants in the areas most effected by the adjustment.

Maybe this is not what it is in newer versions but thats what v1 is about.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"