Hello,

I think all of us who are shooting drama with goals for high-end projection would rather dump our Sony FX1/Z1U's in favor of an all-progressive 24p HD camera or would even blow our DVX 24p footage up to 720/1080 if it would look decent (IMO, even Red Giant's "Instant HD" product looks like crap). Wouldn't a completely progressive resolution with all available pixels be sexy?

But with most of our budgets, all we can afford to do to be able to afford the extra equipment we need (some need a 35mm adaptor or extra stabilizers) is our FX1's and we have to make the best product we can with them.

I'll use the example I am most likely going to purchase: an FX1e with a Beachtek XLR adaptor and a Red Rock M2 (which I have already ordered).

Having spent a couple of hours looking over articles on deinterlacing ("instant sex", "smart deinterlacing", "deinterlacing with a fox in a box") and reading about products like Red Giant's "Magic Bullet", "DV Filmmaker", "Nattress", and all of the other programs used so frequently and reading about the potential capturing methods I will be using (most likely to be Cineform)... I have arrived at a point of confusion.

In your valuable opinions, would the method of achieving 24p through, say, Magic Bullet's deinterlacing solution by converting 50i to 25p be any better than recording HDV using the FX1e's Cineframe 25 (which is supposed to have much less resolution loss and not be as stuttery over CF24) to get a good idea of the kind of motion I want and then have Cineform perform a conversion to 24p for me?

Your opinions would be welcome.

Regards,

Michael Cooper

IMO, Algosuite adaptive de-interlacer is the one to beat, if you have After Effects, Shake or Digital Fusion then you can buy a one week licence for $59
enough to render 1080p for three feature films

http://shop.algolith.com/product.php?productid=16201&cat=26&page=1

Michael,

CF25 is a simple field duplicator. You lose half of your vertical resolution (540 vertical, that's less than progressive SD PAL!). If you were to shoot normal 50i and use an adaptive deinterlacer in post, you'd get better resolution. Ever worse case scenario, it would be the same, but most often you'd get much better. Especially for tripod shots where the background has minimal motion, you would see a big difference deinterlacing in post.

However, balance that with the extra time, effort, and recompression, and you have some things to think about. However, I think common wisdom is to avoid CF mode at all costs.

Josh

I think common wisdom is to avoid CF mode at all costs

I think "common wisdom" is an oxymoron.

Common F.U.D. is to avoid CF mode at all costs.

In my personal experience, working the CF modes yields significant benefits both in facilitating workflow and reducing compression artifacts. If you have access to a sophisticated deinterlacer - it MAY be worth the render times and yield superior results to CF modes, but that's hardly a guarantee.

-Steve

Steve,

Sorry about that. I mentioned it was a trade-off in terms of quality vs. time and effort. However, the aboslute worst software deinterlacer on the planet would be no worse than CF25, but most of them are much, much better than that.

I'm sure you have seen Adam Wilt's article (http://www.adamwilt.com/HDV/cineframe.html). I guess if you intend to downsample to progressive SD, then CF25 is a a good shortcut.

Josh

Actually when you shoot interlaced video the video needs to be filtered with an interlace filter that reduces the amount of detail to 810 lines. This means if you were to deinterlace in post a scene with a slight bit of motion you only get 405 lines of detail compared to CF25 giving you the full unfiltered 540 lines.

Yes still scenes or sections of a frame with no moving pixels could get you at best 810 lines but once you get movement that drops down to 405.

With CF25 you know you will always have a consistant 540 lines of resolution no matter how the frames move.