Bob Richardson
May 10th, 2010, 04:07 PM
Nearly 15 years ago I was involved in an outdoor light show production for a public event, and another one two years later.
Although I managed documenting the show on video back at the time, I have not been in possession of the master tapes until recently. Now, for reasons both of nostalgia and because several of the original team are interested in securing funding to do a new show, and because the master tapes were finally found (in a crawlspace -- not mine!), I'm re-editing these in FCP.
The original tapes were S-VHS and Beta SP, NTSC (interlaced, of course). I had a production house transfer these to ProRes 422(HQ) NTSC (still interlaced) -- the point was to get the best possible transfer without introducing any conversion artifacts. The transfer looks fine to me (considering the age and quality of the original recordings).
But, for various reasons (primarily because we are posting the video online), I want to convert the footage to progressive. (Please don't try to talk me out of this.) I'm running into a great many headaches with this.
Here's the root of the problem:
At many points during the light show, there is an effect done with a strobe light. The strobe is fast, and sometimes it only shows up in the Even or Odd field, but not both.
If I place my interlaced clip on a progressive timeline in FCP7, and apply no filters, FCP7 creates a progressive frame by merely throwing away one of the fields, and then doubling the lines in the remaining field.
Not only does this look terrible, resolution-wise, but it also removes many of the strobe effects altogether (because they were only visible in one field).
I thought I could solve this by running the whole production through Compressor first, because it has more advanced deinterlacing controls.
In Compressor, if I turn Frame Controls on, output fields set to "Progressive", I have three choices of deinterlacing methods. The first, "Line Averaging" actually just seems to do the same thing that Final Cut does -- throws away half the information, and loses many of the strobe effects. The other two, "Better - Motion Adaptive" and "Best - Motion Compensated" look much better in terms of resolution, but the strobe effects are still mostly gone -- I'm thinking that because they occur in only one field, the deinterlacing algorithm is dismissing them as noise.
So, back to Final Cut. I've tried any number of deinterlacing filters on the timeline, from FCP's own "deinterlace", to TMTS, Joe's Filters, Nattress, and ReVision. All have slightly different results some have a wide array of controls, but I keep winding up with results that look like half the resolution is gone, or you can't see the strobe.
All I really want is for all the scan lines in a complete interlaced frame (two fields, even and odd), to be rendered into one progressive frame.
I don't care if there are motion artifacts or the usual things that bother people about interlaced footage. In this case, the camera is locked down, the entire presentation is an abstract light/music show. Losing resolution or losing the strobes is not acceptable.
Any advice? If my description above isn't clear enough, let me know and I'll take some time and put together some sample clips which should make the story obvious.
All I really want to do is force FCP to use every available scan line when making a progressive frame, no other changes.
Late update: The program JES Deinterlacer is providing much better results than the other methods, but it can only output to a limited array of formats. I'm afraid that introducing a format conversion (to Apple Intermediate Codec in this case) is slightly degrading the video over staying in ProRes. And JES also seems to be playing gamma and cropping just a tad.
Thanks in advance!
Although I managed documenting the show on video back at the time, I have not been in possession of the master tapes until recently. Now, for reasons both of nostalgia and because several of the original team are interested in securing funding to do a new show, and because the master tapes were finally found (in a crawlspace -- not mine!), I'm re-editing these in FCP.
The original tapes were S-VHS and Beta SP, NTSC (interlaced, of course). I had a production house transfer these to ProRes 422(HQ) NTSC (still interlaced) -- the point was to get the best possible transfer without introducing any conversion artifacts. The transfer looks fine to me (considering the age and quality of the original recordings).
But, for various reasons (primarily because we are posting the video online), I want to convert the footage to progressive. (Please don't try to talk me out of this.) I'm running into a great many headaches with this.
Here's the root of the problem:
At many points during the light show, there is an effect done with a strobe light. The strobe is fast, and sometimes it only shows up in the Even or Odd field, but not both.
If I place my interlaced clip on a progressive timeline in FCP7, and apply no filters, FCP7 creates a progressive frame by merely throwing away one of the fields, and then doubling the lines in the remaining field.
Not only does this look terrible, resolution-wise, but it also removes many of the strobe effects altogether (because they were only visible in one field).
I thought I could solve this by running the whole production through Compressor first, because it has more advanced deinterlacing controls.
In Compressor, if I turn Frame Controls on, output fields set to "Progressive", I have three choices of deinterlacing methods. The first, "Line Averaging" actually just seems to do the same thing that Final Cut does -- throws away half the information, and loses many of the strobe effects. The other two, "Better - Motion Adaptive" and "Best - Motion Compensated" look much better in terms of resolution, but the strobe effects are still mostly gone -- I'm thinking that because they occur in only one field, the deinterlacing algorithm is dismissing them as noise.
So, back to Final Cut. I've tried any number of deinterlacing filters on the timeline, from FCP's own "deinterlace", to TMTS, Joe's Filters, Nattress, and ReVision. All have slightly different results some have a wide array of controls, but I keep winding up with results that look like half the resolution is gone, or you can't see the strobe.
All I really want is for all the scan lines in a complete interlaced frame (two fields, even and odd), to be rendered into one progressive frame.
I don't care if there are motion artifacts or the usual things that bother people about interlaced footage. In this case, the camera is locked down, the entire presentation is an abstract light/music show. Losing resolution or losing the strobes is not acceptable.
Any advice? If my description above isn't clear enough, let me know and I'll take some time and put together some sample clips which should make the story obvious.
All I really want to do is force FCP to use every available scan line when making a progressive frame, no other changes.
Late update: The program JES Deinterlacer is providing much better results than the other methods, but it can only output to a limited array of formats. I'm afraid that introducing a format conversion (to Apple Intermediate Codec in this case) is slightly degrading the video over staying in ProRes. And JES also seems to be playing gamma and cropping just a tad.
Thanks in advance!