Anyone de interlacing?
 

I want to use my FX1 along with my Canon XL2, with the XL2 shooting in 30p and 24p.Everyone has suggested to shoot the FX1 in 60i and later de interlace. We edit with PPro, and apparently its' de interlacer isn't great. It was suggested to go with either magic Bullett or after effects.
I'd like to hear what others are doing in this situation.
Bruce S. Yarock

I deinterlace with ppro. Magic Bullet is better, bit 30x slower.

I've only used it with standard definition, but DVfilm Maker is another option. They have a free demo you can try: http://www.dvfilm.com/maker/

I've used VirtualDub to deinterlace 60i to 60p for slow motion stuff. You can find info near the bottom at the following link:

http://www.100fps.com/

Bill

Procoder has a good deinterlacer.

And .... if you are familiar with or willing to learn avisysnth scripts then some of the free filters like LeakkernelDeint and MVBob are actually better than the commercial tools, IMHO.

Resizer 2.0 from Digital Anarchy has a very good de-interlacer included.

I second the VirtualDub option. It's free, you can export to a lossless codec if you have one installed, and there's a (free) "Smart Deinterlace" filter that works very well and has several blending & interpolation options.

Did I mention it's free?

HTH,
Matt

Mikko,
Why do you say that magic bullett is better? What does it do that's better?
I have Ppro, and tried de interlacing, but didn't vreally notice any difference.

Boyd,
That company looks interesting. Ash greyson told me that the owner is the guy that holds the 24p patent. Wha's your experience with the program?

Thanks to everyone else also for info.
Bruce S. yarock

Im not sure about the patent, unless he is part of the 24p company that everyone pays royalties too. But different programs hold quality, when you deinterlace you loose resolution. So different programs are designed to keep more resolution than others.

When I hit pause on an FX1 camcorder and see a smooth picture that looks like a normal still photo, has the camcorder temporarily deinterlaced the picture--and thus am I seeing a lower resolution picture? Or... what...? I've read the article and I'm still after all this time embarrassed and confused about why deinterlacing reduces res...

Also the 2001 article linked above said that Bobbing and Weaving was the best way to deinterlace if you could afford it. Are there affordable Bobbing and Weaving programs now?

Betsy,
Perhaps an illustration. I've attached a frame capture from before and after deinterlacing. I use VirtualDub with the SmartDeinterlace filter. I'm not sure how the various cameras handle pauses on the LCD screen, but TVs are generally interlaced--I'd expect to see a more-or-less smooth picture when pausing FX1 while playing on TV, since most (affordable?) TVs are interlaced. Perhaps somebody more technical could offer a better explanation.

Anyhow, you will lose some picture information because you are joining two different fields that were taken at two distinct points in time. Each field contains only half a picture. Instead of taking 30 full-blown pictures per second, you're taking 60 pictures (fields) with half the picture missing--alternating halves are taken so two halves comprise 1 frame. Right, so you probably already know that. So, add the two fields together and you get a frame--but you gotta guess at how the two fields fit together correctly, since they *are* two different points in time. That's where you're losing resolution--you have to guess at how the two different points in time should be put together to represent 1 point in time (where the final 1 point in time is twice as long as either of the the original points alone).

The left image in the attached capture represents two fields of one frame being exported to a single image, with no interpolation, blending, bobbing, or weaving. The right image has been through VirtualDub (and Color Finesse, too...). You can see some blur if you look closely (or even not too closely--it's pretty high motion). Putting the two fields together means VirtualDub had to make up some information to try to get the two fields to look decent as one progressive frame.


Hope this doesn't provide additional confusion....

Matt

"So, add the two fields together and you get a frame--but you gotta guess at how the two fields fit together correctly, since they *are* two different points in time. That's where you're losing resolution--you have to guess at how the two different points in time should be put together to represent 1 point in time (where the final 1 point in time is twice as long as either of the the original points alone)."

Thanks Matt:) So somewhere in the confusion of figuring out which frame goes with which frame, some information is lost?

You can shoot in 60i with 30f and get a very similar look to 30p. For Final Cut Pro users, try out www.nattress.com -- his deinterlacers are nice.

heath

Unfortunately 30 fps doesn't do me much good since J-Ro and I are going for the film look and the last camera we had was that JVC HD-1 which did 30p--which was still enough fps to make it look video-y.

It actually tries to estimate motion. Ppro doesn't, but that's why it's a lot faster than magic bullet. You can see it when there are horizontal lines, magic bullet deinterlacer makes them look better than premieres.

Personally, I still wouldn't use magic bullet as the time difference/quality isn't in its favor.