volleyball footage interlacing problem...
 

Hi all. Did an 8mm analog tape capture of volleyball footage and am creating a highlight dvd for a client to send to interested colleges (Rutgers, for one). The process went smoothly (the uncompressed avi caps look fine), but when I rendered the project to mpg I get what looks like interlacing in any of the shots with camera panning or zooming. Even the rendered avi of the project had the problem. I had just updated to Vegas Pro 8.0b and DVDA 4.5b, had my render settings at Best, Gaussian blur, blend fields, lower field first, and .9091 pixel aspect ratio. I've never had this problem before, so I reinstalled version 8.0a and 4.5a, respectively, with no results. The only difference I can see with this project from most of the others I've done is the camera the client shot with, a Sony Hi8 Handycam TRV68, and he had a lot of fast camera movement. But I've captured plenty of analog footage before, even crappy vhs stuff, and never seen this.
Any help would be appreciated. Here are two examples, a rendered mpg and avi clip. The avi is 47 mb. Thanks.
http://firsttakestudios.com/demos/atlanta2007clip1.mpg
http://firsttakestudios.com/demos/atlanta2007clip1.avi

figured it out...
 

I just found out that by my slightly zooming in with the track's pan/crop properties (to get rid of slight off tracking noise along the edge of the captures) I had caused the interlacing problems. I didn't know this and have done it before on other transfers I have done to get rid of tape compression noise along the edges, without noticing a problem. I guess the faster cam movement from this footage made the problem with this technique more obvious. I solved the edge noise problem by a slight black masking of the borders...
Glad I got a handle on this, it's due tomorrow...

Vin, odds are pretty good that, when you zoomed in, you ended up on the wrong video line (odd vs. even or the other way around), thus changing it from lower field to upper field.
The only solution would be to zoom in or out further by one line.

Thanks Mike. Ed Troxel mentioned the same thing and I'll have to test that out. Man, it makes me realize how much I have to learn about basics in editing...

Vince,
Try rendering with the progressive mode on (instead of lower field). I've been able to get rid of interlace artifact problems by doing that in the past. Hope it helps.
Randy

Keep in mind that rendering progressive will reduce your temporal (time) resolution in half. Instead of 59.94 individual images per second, you will only have 29.97 and it will tend to have a "stuttering" effect on fast motion.

I'm not going to render interlaced sports footage as progressive, there is too much fast motion, and I've finished the project interlaced and used the rectangular mask and it came out very nice. Thanks for all the great input!