Does FCP have a problem with video shot in either 30i or 60i??

I shot a wedding set on 60i, 4:3, and when I imported it into FCP the quality went down dramatically. I've got a post on the forum about FCP exporting to DVD Studio Pro with interlace artifacts, but I now want to see if the problem is in the original DV tape itself, or FCP.

Why is it that when I play the DVD footage on my LCD TV there are obvious artifacts? I imported the footage as 3:2 DV NTSC. Could this be a problem? The Sequence Setting has the interlace set at upper field (it was originally lower field, but the upper field seemed to help a little bit). The video codec is H.264.

Ahhhh! I would REALLY love to find out what I can do to fix this problem.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

If your problem is "interlacing" I really don't think you can "fix" it. SD DVDs are interlaced, don't try to deinterlace something going to an SD DVD. Can someone else confirm this?

Okay, yeah, that's what I thought. A DVD software will just re-interlace anything anyway.

So, what exactly might be the problem here? I've recorded 30i and 60i footage on my XL2 with no prior such problem. So, is there something I might be able to do to sharpen the image or, more precisely, make the artifacts much less obvious?

Oh, and by the way, when I shoot in 60i, 4:3 format, what is the correct import format I should use for FCP? Is it 4:3 or the default setting I have of 3:2?

Just open up a new project w/the DV/NTSC Easy Setup and all the sequence and project settings will be correct.

You mentioned H.264 in your original post. What did you use h.264 for? If you are editing NTSC DV w/the intent of putting it on an SD DVD h.264 should appear anywhere in your work flow.


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Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your response. The Sequence Setting was initially at DV NTSC codec setting; I changed it to H.264 to see if it would make any difference that way.

In any case, can I open a new project with the Easy DV NTSC setup, and then import my existing project into it? Would that take care of the issue?

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your response. The Sequence Setting was initially at DV NTSC codec setting; I changed it to H.264 to see if it would make any difference that way.

In any case, can I open a new project with the Easy DV NTSC setup, and then import my existing project into it? Would that take care of the issue?

As long as your media was captured using the proper DV NTSC settings then, yes, you can import them into a new DV NTSC project. That would be my first step in narrowing down the problem.


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Vishad, this may or may not be helpful for your particular situation, but I once had to convert some footage which looked horribly interlaced (so bad that something looked definitely wrong). I think the codec of the original footage was some sort of MPEG-2 variant and I had to convert it to a DV Quicktime movie.

I used MPEG Streamclip (it's a free download from Squared5, you can Google it). I did an "Export to Quicktime" and checked the box which said "Deinterlace Video".

It got rid of the "terribly interlaced" look and the resultant footage was excellent except for some slight artifacting during the quick dissolves (which wasn't really noticeable by the viewer when played at normal speed).

I then put the DV Quicktime into Compressor to make the DVD assets and the resultant .m2v file maintained the excellent quality.

This may not match your circumstances but I thought it worth mentioning as it could provide you with a workable option.

If your video looks good in your timeline, then the problem is not final cut. If you are having artifact issues, that can happen if h264 was not set to best, or maybe if you use studio pro, it has to recompress your h264! But if you have studio pro, you might just want to import an uncompressed quicktime to burn. (export quicktime-NOT CONVERSION from final cut for an uncompressed video.) Newer DVD studio pro will compress it for you, and under the preferences you can select two pass vbr, and bring up the bitrate (just a little or it will fail) for higher quality. If you do this you know you've done all you can.
But if your video looks bad in final cut, you've got a different problem. And if studio pro does fail, throw away the folder called "mpeg" that it makes, and turn down the bitrate a little.

Hi Aric,

Yeah, it's the footage in the timeline that's bad as well. But since I almost alway shoot in 60i I figured it was just my monitor not displaying both fields.

I'll try MpegStreamclip to see if that works. Thanks everyone for your help!

If the footage in your timeline is bad then make a new sequence, hold control and click on the sequence and select settings. experiment with new settings, and bring in a clip, see if it looks better.
This just happened to me today, where I was given a quicktime movie and put it into the default FCP timeline. Final cut gave me an error and said that the clip doesn't match my sequence settings, it said it could change the settings to match that of the clip. I clicked OK and the clip looked awful. It was actually harsh interlacing, more than usual. I made my own sequence settings in a new sequence and brought the same clip in, and it looked great. But I had to render the whole clip to play it.

Yeah, thanks, Aric! I'll do that right after I finish testing with Mpeg Streamclip. I'll post how everything goes!

actually that didn't work. I got it to look god in final cut, but after the DVD was burned it went back to an extra jagged interlaced look. I just brought it into after effects and interpretted footage, to fix it. This seems to be working so far.

I tried that in AE last week and it really didn't seem to work too well for me. Then again my video is about 120mins, so....

Anyway, someone else posted another way to fix this. It sounds like it could work. Here's the link http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?p=742949#post742949.

The comment is at the bottom of the post.

Interpret footage seemed to work for me, you said you tried that already? You know to select upper or lower in the "seperate fields" drop down right? Off does nothing.

Hi Aric,

Yeah I tried that. As far as I know there was something really funky going on with the footage. It might have been the DV tapes themselves (even though I purchased brand new tapes for this particular shoot). In any case, copying and pasting the video in the video2 timeline in FCP, and adjusting the deinterlace filters took care of most of the issue. There's a little bit of interlace artifacts left, but I'm watching the footage on my LCD TV, so it might just be the TV itself.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but this seemed like the best place to post this.

I originally created a project in FCP 4.5 with both captured DV footage and moving picture files. I captured the video in FCP 4.5 and created the pictures in Photoshop 7 (RGB Mode). I then converted it to MPEG-2 format with Discreet Cleaner 6. Everything processed perfectly. I've since gone to FCS2 and converted the project file over to FCP6. Everything plays fine on the time line. I've exported the clip as an uncompressed mov file and brought it back into FCP to test on an NTSC monitor, everything still plays fine. Here is where the problem begins.

I am encoding this material to a program stream .mpg file. It's a 30 second spot, NTSC formated SD content, interlaced for output through our ad insertion equipment. After encoding one of two things happen depending on which field dominance I select:

- Bottom Field: my video plays fine, but the moving pictures stutter.
- Top Field: my video is horribly interlaced and jerky, moving pictures appear fine.

I'm no longer using Cleaner 6 and have been using Compressor 3 since the switch to FCS2. I have to believe Compressor is the culprit here, but I don't have the hard facts to support it. I can't go back to using Cleaner because I need an encoder that can do both program and transport stream encoding.

Here are the settings for Compressor

Name: ADTEC MPEG
Description: MPEG-2 Program Stream with MPEG audio at 48kHz. Settings based off the source resolution and frame-rate.
File Extension: mpg
Estimated file size: 2.58 GB/hour of source
Segmentation on cluster disabled
Type: MPEG-2 program stream
Video Encoder
Format: M2V
Width: 720
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: NTSC CCIR 601/DV
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: 29.97
Frame Controls: Automatically selected: Off
Start timecode from source
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Field dominance: Lower
Average data rate: 5.5 (Mbps)
Best motion estimation
Closed GOP Size: 15, Structure: IBP
Audio Encoder
Format: MPEG
Sample Rate: 48.000kHz
Channels: 2
Bits Per Sample: 16

Is there something not set correctly that would be causing this interlacing problem after encoding? Any help would be appreciated and again, sorry for hijacking the thread, but I thought maybe Vishad's problem and mine were somehow connected.

Yeah, that's something like the problem I'm having.

Hi Aric,

Yeah, I tried that twice. The first time it really didn't seem to make any improvements. Then the second time the option just wasn't there. I couldn't even get interpolation to work. It worked on another, smaller clip, but it just didn't work for this one.

Any suggestions? I'm really at wits end now with this footage.

Hi Aric,

Yeah, I tried that twice. The first time it really didn't seem to make any improvements. Then the second time the option just wasn't there. I couldn't even get interpolation to work. It worked on another, smaller clip, but it just didn't work for this one.

Any suggestions?

Hi,

Im having a similar problem to john in that I'm mixing screen grab footage i recorded through ishowu with DV footage. when i have field dominance set to one the screen grabs look great but the Dv footage looks bad and when i set it to lower I get the opposite - DV footage looks great screen grabs look bad.

I've tried FCPs de-interlace on the DV footage but it makes it look very soft.

Is there another plugin or some other software I can use to either fix the DV footage or the screen grabs?

Thanks

Phil.

Hi Aric,

Yeah, I tried that twice. The first time it really didn't seem to make any improvements. Then the second time the option just wasn't there. I couldn't even get interpolation to work. It worked on another, smaller clip, but it just didn't work for this one.

Any suggestions? I'm really at wits end now with this footage.

I don't know what after effects you have, and you may know how to do all this stuff but: Bring your original captured footage into AE. Control click your footage in your project window and select interpolation. Choose upper or lower from the drop down menu, and at the bottom choose what type of footage it is. Just make a movie of a very short clip from the footage, as animation, with all the best settings ofcourse. Only then can you really judge the picture.
I forgot to ask this before, but how does your footage look in your capture scratch, and does it look good on the tape?

I was able to work around the problem by exporting an uncompressed Quicktime movie, then bring that clip back into FCP and deinterlace the entire clip, then re-export with compressor with my aforementioned settings (bottom field dominance). I've also noticed that of all the clips I'm encoding with Compressor, the only clips that experience this interlacing problem are ones with still images or PSD files included in them.

I hope this isn't a bug in Compressor and is just something I'm doing (or failing to do). I can't use this work-around very much as I have a lot of material I have to encode weekly and it would take far too long to go that route.