Hi there,

I might be completely off the mark here, but is there a ‘hardware’ de-interlace device for FCP3, maybe a video capture card?

The ‘soft’ de-interlace in FCP which results in a notable loss of resolution, was something I could live with for a while but now I want better.

I decided to download a 3rd party demo plugin which claimed to give the 'best' results and I have to say the result was pretty good. However, there is a huge and for me unacceptable downside, rendering times have gone through the roof! A 5-min de-interlaced sequence took more than 2 hours to run out.

Cheers,

Simon.

What version of FCP are you using and what sort of computer? Those render times are way off base. For some reason "Joe's Deinterlacer" renders very slowly on FCP3, but is reported to be much faster on newer versions. I use DVFilm Maker (http://www.dvfilm.com/maker/) on a G6/1.25 and it isn't exactly speedy, but nowhere near this slow. It's a little standalone program that you feed Quicktime files. You can queue up batches of files to render, and it also runs in the background.

I don't think there's a hardware card that will do this, but maybe someone else has seen one.

FCP 3, G4, OS X .. ..

I downloaded a demo of DV Filmaker and will give it a go. Don't you find the fact that you must first output quicktime files a bit of a distraction in your workflow?

Yes, and it prefers shorter clips, like 20 minutes. Am just debating whether I want to run about 4 hours of footage through it before I edit (will be easier than trying to break it into sections after editing). However to do this would require putting the processed footage on an external drive due to space limitations. OTOH, it wouldn't be hard to just queue everything up and let it run overnight, which is what I did the last time I wanted to deinterlace a big project.

Ha ha - just noticed my typo where I said I had a G6 - don't get excited anyone, it's just a lowly G4 ;-)

I had wondered about that G6 :)

Last night I outputted my 5 minute sequence as a self-contained FCP movie file and then dropped it in to the demo copy of DVFilm maker. Without making any alterations to DVFilm makers standard settings I just let the process run.

The process was started around 8:30pm and was still running close to midnight! I just can't figure that one out. As I live in London, the only difference I can see is that I am recording PAL and not NTSC. This shouldn't matter should it?

I don't think it's my G4, that seems to be quite happy doing everything else that's required of it.

How much ram do you have, how full is the drive you're rendering to and what version of FCP (3.x.x) and OS X (10.x.x)?

I can only provide the following data point from a test I did nearly a year ago. I know that DVFilm Maker has been updated since then and I haven't tested the new version. My tests did not involve letterboxing, just deinterlacing using the default settings:

System: Power Mac G4/1.25 Ghz SINGLE processor
RAM: 1.25 GB
MacOS 10.2.8
FCP 3.0.4 (this shouldn't matter since DVFilm is a standalone application)
Disk: Maxtor 160 GB Internal 7200 rpm ATA 100
Deinterlace time: 256 seconds per minute of video

So in other words I would expect my machine to take less than 22 minutes to deinterlace a 5 minute clip. What does Marcus say about PAL footage on his site? Are you sure it's compatible? You could try e-mailing him.

Also, FCP4, and FCPHD are significantly faster than FCP3.

I know of no hardware de-interlacers for FCP, but the built in one is pretty poor and should be avoided.

If you've not looked at my products, you can check out Film Effects, and also the de-interlacer that comes with it - will run a bit faster than the "big" plugin.

Graeme

<<<-- Originally posted by Graeme Nattress : Also, FCP4, and FCPHD are significantly faster than FCP3 -->>>

Sure, but something else must be wrong with Simon's setup. A render that takes twenty some minutes on my G4 is taking him over 3.5 hours...

But which 3rd party demo plugin did he use??

Graeme

Graeme, he didn't identify the plug-in he first tried, but in a post above he says he downloaded DVFilm Maker (a standalone program, not a plugin) and used it on a 5 minute clip, then finally bailed out after it spent over 3.5 hours rendering. So something is definitely wrong there...

Hi there,

Sorry for the delay in writing back, I’ve been out of the country for a few days.

In answer to your question, here are the specifics of my system:

Dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4
512mb Memory

OSX 10.2

FCP 3.0.2

120GB firewire HDD with plenty of free space.

---------------------------------------------

Regardless of the software used, it seems a little strange that my system should take so long to crunch a 5-minute sequence. I recently cut a 1-hour documentary with it and gave it a pretty brutal run for its money, without any untoward time penalties.

Here’s a thought; I have a friend who owns a G5 and similar video system to myself. Perhaps I’ll ask him to download a couple of de-interlace plugins, run a 5 minute sequence through each of them and monitor the results.

Upgrade to FCP 3.0.4, it is more stable than 3.0.2 Also 512MB is just barely enough to run FCP. You should upgrade ram to at least 1GB. How full is your HD your rendering to? Do you have FCP in the Applications folder and is the Applications folder on the same drive and partitions as the OS?

Jeff, the program he's having problems with is DVFilm Maker. It is a separate application that runs completely independent of FCP. I agree with the recommendations wrt FCP, however he doesn't seem to be having a problem there. Something else strange must be happening.

Simon, maybe you should try the test again and make certain that no other programs are running in the background. 512MB RAM does sound a little low, although it ran fine on my G4/733 with 768MB RAM.

Hi there,

I do hear what you say about the 512mb RAM issue, yet as I wrote previously I have cut a 1 hour documentary on my set-up, colour corrected it, composited effects etc etc and never really experienced any significant loss in render times. Actually I have consistently achieved render times of around 20-mins per 5-min of sequence, which I think is the norm.

In reference to Jeff’s other point, my internal HDD is a single partition with everything located in the place where the original installer suggested. I do remember reading a post that suggested the OS and FCP should sit on exclusive partitions however, as I’ve mentioned, I haven’t noticed any real problems before. There is GB’s of spare space on the Firewire drive where the render files are stored.

I downloaded the Film Effects demo last night and gave it a go at de-interlacing. It took 3 hours to render out a 5-min sequence. As far as the quality of the final result goes, and I am only reporting on what I have seen so far, the sequence is at this point unusable. During fade in.’s there is what I can only describe as ‘solarisation’. Errant frames seem to be left behind which in effect turn straight cut’s into very short dissolves and any action (the piece was shot in an ice-rink, so there’s lots) results in excessive ghosting and blurring around the subject.

I did read the instructions to Film Effects and can say that I did not shoot my original footage like film, i.e. shutter speed of 1/60th. Apart from this though, everything else was per the instructions and I can’t see where my mistakes might lie. I will shoot some material at 1/60th and see if the results are better, which I am sure they will be.

I am no expert and would therefore concede that 3rd party plugin's or standalone programs may require, in their design, more render times. I would also concede that another 512mb RAM would help things. However, if that were the case, I would find it surprising that a system which chugs along quite nicely, falls to its knees when asked to complete a task by a 3rd party program or plugin, that it itself has proven to be capable of doing quickly, if not to a lesser standard of course.

If you want a really simple de-interlacer, Simon, drop me an email and I'll cut all the other stuff you don't need out of my code and make a little hod rodded version for you to try. I've seen one other person report the solarization bug - it's something inside FCP or settings or something, and for the life of me I can't remember what caused it. I'll have to go hunt through my tech support emails and find the cause.

Graeme

There is still something very wrong if it takes 3 hours to render a 5 minute sequence I think. I don't know about Film Effects, but DV Film should only take you a bit over 20 minutes to do that.

You mentioned you were running OS X 10.2. My recollection is that there were some serious problems with versions of OS X older than 10.2.8. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Perhaps there's some other software running in the background that dogs down your system? I don't think having a single partition on your internal drive will be a problem at all. The only other thing which I'd suggest checking is the formatting of your external firewire drive. "Out of the box" many of these are preformatted as PC drives. They will mount on the Mac this way, but performance is greatly impaired. You might check that drive just to confirm that it's formatted for "Mac OS Extended". There could be other issues with an external drive too. Have you tried this same experiment by putting the input and output files on the internal drive? Any speed difference there?

If you're seeing a slowdown by a factor of 900% (taking 3 hours to do something which should take 20 minutes) then SOMETHING is wrong SOMEWHERE. While it may not manifest itself in FCP itself, I would want to know what was going on if it were my computer...

One other thought... what version of QuickTime are you running? All these programs use it. I know there are some issues with FCP 3 and newer versions of Quicktime. I have Quicktime 6.3 pro on my machine.

Use Process Viewer (an Apple supplied application in your utilities folder) to check what application are using what percent of the CPU. This will confirm Boyd's suspicions of another program hogging the CPU. Your hard drive needs to have at least 30% free space. Unix base systems (OS X) will experience problems when the drive fills greater than 80%.

Hi there,

Graham, that’s a fantastic offer and I will gladly take you up on it, email’s in the post.

The more I think of this, the more I feel that lack of RAM is the issue. I’ll purchase some and see if that speeds things up.

Everything else seems within the limits you guys have suggested: 115.03GB drive with 58.15GB free space, Mac OS Extended format. I can pretty much qualify that there isn’t any other piece of s/w grabbing processor time because I purposefully haven’t installed or run any on the machine, it is used solely for editing. QuickTime version is 6.0.1, which is the version that shipped with FCP.

Operations running in the background can hog CPU cycles. The feature that allows the time to be set over the internet automatically can be a big problem, as well as anti-virus software that scans new files. Run a small test and run Process Viewer at the same time and it will put the issue to rest and confirm your need for more ram.

Hi there,

I’ve just run this test: 5-min original sequence, dropped FCP’s deinterlace filter on to it and began rendering. Estimated time to finish - 20 mins.

In Process Viewer CPU usage is 170% and memory usage is 10.5%. There is nothing else listed having any real impact on the system.

Don’t know what you make of these figures Jeff, are they sort you are used to seeing? (Won’t be able to reply until tomorrow, must get some sleep!)

Simon.