Oh my god, I just watched a DVD of my most recent wedding and the moire is REALLY bad. Scenes with greenery, leaves, rooftops just jitter and look horrible.

When the camera is being held steady, it's not there, of course, but when I was following the bride during the processional the grass and other fine details in the background shimmer and vibrate terribly.

The moire is noticable on bluray, but on DVD it's off the charts.

It was shot in 4k. Will shutter speed adjustments help in future shoots?

Or do I need to abandon 4k which is 30p and go with HD at faster frame rate?

Huh? On the ax100? I"m not getting any moire at all. Can you show a short clip on vimeo?

Not now, I'm trying to get this mailed. I've seen it on other projects on my TVand on a customer's tv as well but it's really bad this time. If I can find time I'll put something up later, thanks Noa.

NLE and export/render options used were...?

Paul

What was your shutter speed? I found in early tests that if you go above roughly 125, it shimmers badly. This also seems to be made worse if you have sharpness too high on the display TV. Everything I've shot with slower shutter seems to look fine, and I just turned the sharpness setting to zero on my Seiki 39...

Dave, I suspect it was shutter speed related. I did not have shutter speed under manual control, I imagine, but will from now on.

Bit rate for the DVD?

Was it downconverted to SD? Interline Twitter can result from software and not camera related.

Bit rate same as always, standard. Video was only an hour long. Same problem on both bluray, USB, and DVD.

It's just much worse on DVD.

It's not moire what you are seeing, that shimmering effect is something I have noticed as well when I first got the ax100 because I used it handheld at a photoshoot outside with trees and leaves in the background, a effect I managed to decrease significantly by choosing a other image preset on my tv that didn't have the sharpness dialed in so aggressively.
The ax100 resolves a lot of detail and I have a feeling there is also extra incamera sharpening going on, it looks like a full hd tv has problems displaying that very fine detail and I wonder is if 4K footage on a 4K tv would display that same jittering. Also when downscaling to dvd and if you have a scene with so much fine detail, incamera sharpening, a too high shutter and a tv with too high sharpening, that might lead to that "mess" you are seeing when you downconvert from 4K to dvd.
I now only use my ax100 for ceremonies, often set wide, or anything static so I can utilize it's cropping ability and for that purpose the IQ is fantastic, so much detail, even when downscaled, 4K cropped to 1080p size is still easy to match with my other 1080p camera's and it matches color-wise perfectly with my cx730's.

Well Noa you are pretty much agreeing with what Dave said, and yes I hope shutter speed can fix it as Dave suggests. IQ is great with the camera and I'm very happy otherwise with images.

Video was only an hour long. Same problem on both bluray, USB, and DVD.

It's just much worse on DVD.
It sounds like a problem with the software doing the downconversion from 4K to HD and DVD. Which may explain why the DVD has the effect worse than the Blu-Ray. It MAY be made worse by the camera having too high a level of sharpening set in a menu - with 4K you should need very little detail enhancement at all.

In general terms, to get a good downconversion the image needs to be softened *BEFORE* the downscaling step. Moire/aliasing is a result of putting too fine detail into a downscaling process - the principle is the same as in a camera sensor, though there "downscaling" is the process of sampling the image via photosites.

With much software, several processes happen in what seems to a user a single step - and same here, "downconvert" may be doing the downrezzing/downscaling separately without you being aware of it. Hopefully! It sounds as if this isn't happening here, and I can only suggest trying different software.

You may like to experiment on single frames. Downconvert a 3840x2160 frame to 720x480 in Photoshop and does it look the same or better as the downconverted video? If better, I'd regard that as proof the issue is a software one and unrelated to aspects of the camera.

Thanks David.

I once tried using a full sized frame grab to eliminate the issue, an establishing shot, thinking that because the frame grab was still and not video the issue would go away, but it did not. On the final product it shimmered the same when I did a software zoom on the still image. So I'm thinking you are correct.

I had a similar issue with this: Where Snakes Roam I shot back in the day on a GH2 (that opening scene was one of the worst moments). The 1080 looked incredible, but the DVD had a lot of issues with the fine detail, including shimmering and moire.

I never solved it completely, but I tried the softening issue and it really the hurt the scenes that had downconverted to 480 without issue.

Ultimately I went with Red Giant's InstantHD (now Instant 4K) to downconvert and that did a much better job than the other options I tried. If you can spend the time, doing a downconvert frame-by-frame via Photoshop might work too, but definitely not as easy as a InstantHD downconvert in AE.

I really wish more people would request Blu-ray. I've only ever made DVD transfers that I thought were "passable" mostly because they are Standard Def after having seen the HD master.

Thanks Gary.

When I got my FDR-AX1 a year ago I did a lot of tests and found I could create and remove the shimmering depending on how I scaled especially when I viewed on the PC monitor. Just changing the size of the preview window in the monitor, especially in Vegas, made the shimmering come or go clearly a monitor scaling issue. I normally use Edius to edit the FDR-AX1 files on a 1920x1080 timeline with Lanczos 3 scaling and now do not see this issue monitoring. Output for DVD or Bluray is scaled yet again using TMPGenc with Lanczos3. Not sure if this will also work for X70/AX100 but does so for the FDR-AX1 almost all the time. You will not manage to remove for fine black and white stripped shirts etc though.

Ron Evans

It's no surprise that 4K to SD conversions suffer from moire. It's a risk whenever one down-converts from a higher to a lower resolution format. It happens when the detail in the original image is smaller than the target format can resolve and there's any movement in the frame. It has always been a problem when converting HD to SD (DVD), and used to be a huge issue when shooting video on multi-megapixel DSLRs, because of rather simplistic internal down-conversion, though the latest models seem to be rather better.

In the early days of HD, the only really reliable method was to use some very expensive hardware boxes, because someone had expensive patents on the methods. The down-conversion subroutines in NLEs varied widely in their competence. Pinnacle/Avid Liquid does quite a decent job (but on MPEG2 formats only, and now discontinued); Premier Pro appeared to be less good (judging by several commercial DVDs where I know the software the producers used), but hopefully has been improved in recent years.

The quality of the final output is a big factor in deciding whether (or more likely, when) to get a 4k camera. Most of my customers are only able to view HD or even SD DVD, so what would I have to do to get acceptable results? Which NLEs or disc-authoring programs give the best results? How long does it take? Provided 4k-to-HD can be done well in 2-3 hours for a 90 minute production, I don't mind if 4k-to-SD has to be run overnight!

When I downscale 4K to HD, 4K looks more detailed then any of my 1080p camera's can produce. 4K downscaled to dvd also looks more detailed but you do see the compression artifacts, I however don't see such bad moire like Jeff is seeing, at least I didn't notice it, I did however notice that "jittering" on very fine detail and that happens in HD and on dvd, something that gets worse if you have the sharpness on your tv turned on high.

About the time it takes, rendering a 4K file from my ax100 to a 1080p h.264 file is faster then realtime on my 2 year old pc (1 hour of footage is under 45 minutes to export) I always export a hqavi file from edius to import into tmpgenc authoringworks for either blu-ray or dvd. To render a 1080p hqavi file in tmpgenc authoring works to a blu-ray disc is even faster, under 30 minutes for a 1 hour file but for this I use a separate rendercard.

I've been looking into using a hardware solution to down scale my 4K and HD video to SD. Especially after some terrible results with some video that had telephone lines draped across the scene.
Anybody know what works for that? I've looked at the AJA and BMD offerings but not sure whether those conversion boxes are exactly what I want. For the AX100, I could play my 4K video out through the camera's HDMI port into a converter box, and then from there into ???. Would I need a video recorder with and SDI input? And then from my Canon 6D or 7D, I could also play back the HD footage in camera and have it go out via the HDMI port. Looks like most of those hardware converters are really aimed at live feed conversion. Oh, and do these boxes do a better job then the NLE, handbrake, etc. software solutions?
Sorry for all the questions but I want to get the right thing on the first try.

Mark

Decided to pursue the idea of incorporating a hardware-based solution for down-scaling my HD-quality timeline projects to DVD MPEG-2 format. I couldn't find any discussion on this topic. If the quality of a hardware solution is at least as good as what I'm getting from my current software methods, I'll be happy. I narrowed my choices down to the below listed gear. I just pulled the trigger on the JVC SR-HD2700US. What I want it to do is take my HDMI output from my laptop, while I'm outputting my HD timeline video, and downscale that HD signal to SD and save it on the internal HDD as an MPEG-2.

It can also down-convert to MPEG-2 and burn it directly to a DVD, or to both the HDD and DVD simultaneously. Might be handy for someone doing legal depositions; taking the SD or HD output directly from the camera, save as SD on the HDD, and then after the deposition filming is completed, burn the DVD(s) and deliver them on the spot.

I sure hope JVC has some good secret sauce for the down-scaling. Not sure if they do. Would feel better about a name like AJA or Video Devices in this regard, but... guess I'll find out once the device arrives.

JVC SR-HD2700US Blu-ray Disc & HDD Recorder SR-HD2700US B&H

DECIMATOR MD-DUCC Multi-Definition Down Up Cross DD-DUCC B&H

DECIMATOR MD-HX Miniature HDMI/SDI Cross Converter DD-HX B&H

Video Devices PIX 240i 5" Portable Video Recorder PIX 240I

Blackmagic Design Teranex Express TERANEXEXP12GDL B&H Photo


Mark