NTSC HD-SD DVD interlaced field order?

Hi All

We shot a wedding here in the UK yesterday for an American couple who would like the DVD sent to them in the US.

We shot with three EX3s with setting at NTSC in HD HQ1080 60i with shutter at 1/60.

Can someone please advise what field order the cameras are recording at?

I’ll be importing the native HD clips into a FCP SD 8bit uncompressed timeline then edit, down convert to SD from the timeline for final output QT movie.

I haven’t recorded interlaced for years and for the life of me I can’t remember the best Field Order for output to DVD for the US market.

Would appreciate some help.

Thanks
Andy

ministry of video - video design, production and editing company based in london (http://www.ministryofvideo.co.uk)

According my archived notes: DV-SD is Lower Even and HD is Upper Odd

I haven’t recorded interlaced for years and for the life of me I can’t remember the best Field Order for output to DVD for the US market.

There is no advantage of one field order over the other as long as long as the DVD is mastered correctly.

HD is Upper Field first, while SD is Lower Field first.

This will cause strobing when downconverted through Final Cut due to the wrong field order. A good way to correct it is to create a DV AVI from an HD export to XDCAM EX MP4 format that is then taken into XDCAM Browser. Import that DV AVI into FCP to create a DV SD MOV.

Work in HD, then export an HD intermediate that can be converted properly by XDCAM Browser into SD.

For future work, shoot in 1080p and you won't have any problem. For SD work I shoot in 1280 x 720, it converts down very cleanly. .

Field orders are as follows:

HD, including HDV, Upper Field First.
NTSC SD all codecs, Lower Field First
PAL SD All codecs except DV, DVCAM, 25Mb/s DV XDCAM,Upper Field First
PAL SD DV, DVCAM, 25Mb/s DV XDCAM Lower Field First.

The PAL DV field order reversal causes a lot of issues. Provided you don't use a PAL DV project you should be OK.

Thanks for the feed back guys.

Andreas

HD, including HDV, Upper Field First.
NTSC SD all codecs, Lower Field First
PAL SD All codecs except DV, DVCAM, 25Mb/s DV XDCAM,Upper Field First
PAL SD DV, DVCAM, 25Mb/s DV XDCAM Lower Field First.

I shot a film at 1080i50 PAL HDV and edited it in FCP7.

Then I want to burn it to DVD in iDVD so I grab the timeline and drop it into an Anamorphic DV-PAL timeline and FCP7 automatically adds a filter called Field Order +1 to the whole thing.

I have to render it all but it seems to work nicely and burns well. Why does FCP7 automatically add Field Order +1 instead of -1 or None?

Because the PAL DV field order is the opposite to HDV so the fields have to shifted either + or - 1 field.