Alright, anything I know about the cameras I'm using (which is little enough as it is), has just been figured out on my own guesswork. Though, i hear (see) you guys throwing around terms like "60i" and "24p" and all the numbers in between. I have no clue what this means or how to do it.

Also, when I'm editing footage in FCP, and I slow it down, it gets kinda fuzzy. Why does it lose quality?

Hi Alex, no need to be embarassed about not understanding a few video terms. It takes some reading to understand interlacing (eg 60i - NTSC interlaced footage at 60 FIELDS [2 halves of the image shot and merged, our eyes can't see this trick] per second) and progressive video (24p - 24 being the traditional rate film is shot at in Frames Per Second [FPS] and the p means progressive, each frame being whole, like a still camera.

Read here http://neuron2.net/LVG/interlacing.html to understand how interlacing works.

What's you understand interlacing I believe the merits and attributes of progressive video will become clear.

Enjoy your journey :)

Wow, they were really pushing that VirtualDub thing, huh? Know anything about that?

That page helped, thans! Though, I must say I'm still confused about the whole thing. Why are there different methods? Why can't one method work on both computer and tv?

Check out http://www.100fps.com/ for some good info on deinterlacing.

TVs used an interlaced signal because of bandwidth limitations for image size and frame rate.

Wow ... that looks amazing! So how do I do this on a Mac? Those were all PC based examples to avi, and Virtualdub is PC based, too. Is there a FCP plug in that does this for you? Why is this so complicated?

In FCP there is a deinterlace filter. But it is best to shoot with the end in mind if you can.

"With the end in mind"? What do you mean?

what is the highest frame rate possible?

Wow, they were really pushing that VirtualDub thing, huh? Know anything about that?
virtual dub is just good and free tool, which helps to explain such things. Because just if You have pc, then it's very easy to have vdub. I'm sure theres nothing You can't do with mac using any other tool.

JES De-interlacer http://www.xs4all.nl/~jeschot/home.html is a great tool for Mac for this sort of thing. It's free. I haven't tried version 3.0 yet, but have been satisfied with 2.7.4, It doesn't handle batch processing very well, and the interrface is a little clunky, but the image quality of the results is very good. There's also MPEG Streamclip, which has much better batch tools and is a bit more user friendly, though I find the quality of the de-interlacing isn't as good.

There's nothing for Mac that compares to VirtualDub unfortunately. It's a brilliant programme, allowing you to import, crop, rescale, add multiple filters (including de-interlacing), adjust sound, frame rate and encode to a number of avi-compatible codecs (but not MPEG2 unfortunately) all in a single pass.

what is the highest frame rate possible?

234845723612393457234 fps (frames per second) is the absolute maximum
before the universe starts to collapse on itself, and we don't want that to
happen! However, there is some theory that they are working to enhance
this to 3958345923492349235434593459345 fps in Eureka :)

Sorry... couldn't resist. There is no maximum frame rate although there are
frame rate standards (50 fields / 25 frames per second for PAL and 60 fields /
30 [actually 59.94 & 29.97] frames per second for NTSC) and different file
formats like AVI & MOV (QuickTime) have maximum frame rates.

Then there are also limits on how fast a computer could play back a movie
(and how often your screen updates) etc.

So did you want to know what the standard frame rates are, or?

The 2 TV standard are listed above. Film is 24 fps or sometimes 23.976 fps
in the digital video world.

Graeme Nattress also has some excellent de-interlace and other plugins
for your Mac. To see his algorithms in action:

http://www.nattress.com/Products/FinalTouch/FTGSmartDeint.htm

That's for FinalTouch, but the same filter is also available for FCP:

http://www.nattress.com/Products/filmeffects/filmeffects.htm

The best way, generally, to slow down footage is to deinterlace it first. Then use After Effects 7 Pro to "retime" it. The retimer is intelligent and calculate totally new frames by comparing the differences between them. Note that earlier versions retimer isn't intelligent.

The standard and classic procedure of slowing down is to duplicate the frames. At half speed (50%=1/2) every frame is shown 2 times, at fifth speed (20%=1/5) 5 times etc. Therefore you should avoid using values like 43% of speed (3/7) etc. Hope you get it.

The most common solution when using those odd values that Adobe Premiere uses is to blend fields, which isn't a good option. You're most likely to get the results you described by using frame blending and odd values.

Shortly; deinterlace then slow down using good values or retime the clip in AE 7.


By the way, I've found a killer-deinterlacing script for Avisynth (PC only) that does the best deinterlacing I've ever seen. So I transfer clips from my Mac to PC for deinterlacing and then back again...