I've had my XL2 now for a few months. Love the camera and this forum is required reading with this camera.

To my point. I've noticed on some shots that I've taken a really bad stair stepping or vertical pixelation effect. I'm assuming this is the DV color issue that needs to be corrected with Final Cut 4:1:1 filter. I've tried that to no avail, but I'm sure this is the issue. It's predominant with reds and orange/yellows. I've posted some screen grabs below. Also, I've viewed the same footage on my hidef tv from the vid-out of the xl2 and the artifact is not present.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to eliminate this effect either in shooting or in post. I've been unsuccessful in post, but I'm open to additional suggestions.

Thanks.

The link to the screen grabs is below. Here's the strange thing, after posting these and viewing on the web, the artifact is not there. I'm floored.
I'm looking at the tiff image on my desktop compared to the tiff on the web (same files) and the one on the web doesn't show it. Must be a smoothing that safari is doing. Anyway, what you would have seen clearly is on the two pics of sunsets, around the red sun is big blocky red pixels, looks horrible. On the pic of the girl, her right arm that is overexposed showed vertical pixel streaks. Like blocks of 5 pixels wide striped down her arm.

http://web.mac.com/peteosx/iWeb/Site%202/Photos.html

Pete, could it be that you view your footage in Final Cut at a magnification other than 100%? If so, try to enlarge the viewing window and set the magnification to 100% and the artifacts should be no longer visible. Don't ask me how to to that in FCP because I'm using PPro.

BTW, this happens also in Photoshop when you view the pictures at odd magnifications like 66.7% or 33.3% and so on. It's quite normal.

Heh, no, that was one of the early issues i faced though when using FCP and it threw me for a loop for a while. I know I have the import set as per specs mentioned on this board. I'm importing 24p, and the res you are viewing is 720x480-16:9. The rest of the video looks clear.

Yes, what you're seeing is chroma smoothing issues. But you're not seeing them right :-)

If you were to view the DV on your TV monitor, you'd not see the issues because the deck's analogue output does the smoothing.

In FCP, as long as you're in the DV codec, you'll see the issues. Put your DV in an uncompressed timeline, apply the smoother, and you'll see it "fixed".

See http://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_chroma_sample.html for more info.

Graeme