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-   -   Deinterlacing: DVFilm Maker vs. Vegas (https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/techniques-independent-production/19304-deinterlacing-dvfilm-maker-vs-vegas.html)

Dave Largent January 5th, 2004 03:23 PM

Deinterlacing: DVFilm Maker vs. Vegas
 
I did a deinterlacing comparison using the default
settings of the Film Maker trial.
Vegas removed all the stair stepping and Film Maker
*did not*. Frame grabs show Film Maker *maybe* a
touch sharper, but whites were blown out and had
a light gray cast.
Are there any settings in Film Maker to improve
performance?
I noticed that the original interlaced footage
and the footage deinterlaced by Vegas were
identical in size whereas the Film Maker footage was
a smaller file: 94,666 vs. 94,420.

Boyd Ostroff January 5th, 2004 03:45 PM

That's interesting. I can't really help with the Vegas question, but I've used DVFilm Maker on a Mac quite a bit. Have never noticed that it changed anything with the colors, and it certainly never "blew out the whites". I wonder if this might be related to it converting Windows files to Quicktime or something?

Simon Wyndham January 5th, 2004 07:13 PM

It's funny you should mention all this as I did a similar comparision a few days ago. I did a straight interpolate deinterlace using Vegas and a DVFilmmaker deinterlace.

I put 2 of the same frames together and kept going back and forward between them. The result. I found the deinterlacing of Vegas to give a more detailed picture than DVFilmmaker! The result was even more in Vegas' favour when DVFilmmaker had it's softening of horizontal lines option turned on.

The footage I was comparing was where the camera was constantly in motion. So DVFilmmaker will just have used the line doubling method I would assume. On still images such as title cards the results were the reverse, obviously.

I didn't notice any blowing out of the whites.

Jean-Philippe Archibald January 5th, 2004 09:21 PM

Guys, can you put some frames online so we all can judges the two methods?

Simon Wyndham January 6th, 2004 03:24 AM

I'll give t a go. My problem is finding anywhere to upload.

Interestingly the demo of Fieldskit produced even worse results with the picture being overly soft by comparison.

Jean-Philippe Archibald January 6th, 2004 08:17 AM

If you don't have any space to host your picture, you can email them to me and I will post the link online here.

James Ball January 6th, 2004 10:24 PM

I went to talk to the Guys in Austin
 
The primary business these guys do is to convert DV, HD, betacam, etc. to film.

I drove to Austin to watch their blow-up demo reel taken from the work of clients. I was very impressed. This was several years ago before 24P was in the video vocabulary. I though film gotta die any day now.

Then it happened!

A beautiful aerial view of a city and GAK! all those horrible morray-ing vertical lines. It totally blew away the illusion that this stuff started out on film.

A lot of times we look at just single frames and make a judgement, but these guys are looking at reducing artifacts they see going out to film.

I can't speak to the aliased edges but the vertical lines problem is affected by their world view. DV 2 FILM.

Dave Largent January 6th, 2004 10:58 PM

Just looked at some more frame grabs.
Whites take on a faint gray/blue cast with
Film Maker. Also, Vegas retains more detail.

Jim Lafferty January 7th, 2004 10:32 AM

I did a side-by-side a while back, and posted images scaled up to 200%. Hands down, Vegas produces better results -- however, the best results I've seen yet are through manually combining fields -- i.e. rendering out two separate versions of the same video, one with Upper fields first, one with Lower; placing them in sync, one ontop of the other, in a Vegas Progressive-scan project, and rendering it out.

Lots of work but by far the best results. I'll look for the images and put them up soon.

- jim

Jim Lafferty January 7th, 2004 10:46 AM

Here you go:

http://ideaspora.net/progressive/

These images were direct screen-grabs from the source footage, magnified to 200% in Photoshop, and saved to .jpeg set at level 12.

- jim

Don Donatello January 8th, 2004 10:38 PM

reading over the post i do not see which deinterlacing method was used in VEGAS ?

in Vegas project properties you must set the deinterlace method. was it set to none, blend, or interpolate ?
guessing -from the pic's it looks like blend ??

the filmmaker clip was render out to ? avi? QT ? using ntsc dv template or uncompressed ..
Vegas clip was rendered out as ? avi? Qt ? template ?

did the frame grabs come from Vegas or another program ?

Douglas Spotted Eagle January 13th, 2004 08:55 PM

In doing this in Vegas, the preferred mode is "Blend"
There is a tutorial on how to get a great film look in Vegas, converting 60i to 24p, http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/tu...s/filmlook.htm
that also has some low-rez streaming examples.
Vegas is very, very good at doing this.

Brian Mitchell Warshawsky January 14th, 2004 09:48 PM

DSE wrote:
>>>Vegas is very, very good at doing this.>>>

So, the $4000 question is:

Can you take a Panasonic DCV80 and run it through Vegas, and have it look as good as/better than a DVX100?

Brian

Don Donatello January 14th, 2004 11:00 PM

"as good as/better than a DVX100?"

IMO NO .. not be as good and no way better.
and i would say you would loose some resolution going from 60i to 24p (or even 30p) as you would be blending fields.

will it look good - yes ...

Douglas Spotted Eagle January 16th, 2004 12:24 AM

I don't know that I'd say 'not as good as' but I'd not say 'better,' either. How about very good, and different.
Anytime you transcode framerate, resolution, fields, something will get lost. But...if you don't have a DVX, then this is the best alternative, IMO. You gain a lot by shooting 60i and then inserting pulldown than you do by shooting 30p with most any DV cam, and then inserting pulldown.
The panny is it's own tiger. I don't think it's as cool as so many claim, but it does have a unique look. I prefer my XL1 with an X3 lens for most things anyway, and then use the film look workflow I showed in the tutorial. It's fun, as today at the NAMM show one of the FCP demo guys came up and insisted that some footage I'd shot and am displaying on a large plasma screen had originated in film. Kept telling me "He could just tell, because he's got a lot of film background." Then I showed him the original on my laptop. Was sorta fun.
But if you really want that original 24p cadence with full rez, and great control, get a 24p cam. I just happen to not be a monster fan of the DVX100. I usually do swim upstream tho

Dave Largent January 18th, 2004 10:10 PM

Hey Douglas,
A little off topic, but did you ever do that world premiere of DVD Workshop 2? I use Workshop 1 right now. How is Workshop 2? I heard there's some type of
copyright protection with it.

Gints Klimanis January 21st, 2004 03:47 PM

>In doing this in Vegas, the preferred mode is "Blend"

While I didn't do the "fully manual" process generously described by Jim, I did compare Vegas "Blended" frame grabs to .PNG file with Studio 8's frame grabs deinterlacing to .BMP file. Studio8 won every time. Blend doesn't work well on fast motion sports.
Players end up with two right hands and two sticks. Also, the
color was slightly better in the BMP file, although it was always 3x the size of the PNG file (a lossless compression format) for my tests. This slight color difference, mostly less saturated blues on a bright blue wall background) was consistent on about 10 image comparisons.

Gints Klimanis January 21st, 2004 04:14 PM

Here a web page on the PNG image compression format. I'm wondering if Vegas is saving the file with an incorrect gamma setting or if the difference has to do with PNGs combination of fields.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html

Roy Hinkle January 21st, 2004 08:25 PM

Greetings,

Thanks Douglas for the excellent tutorial.

I have Vegas 4, DFX+ (Digital Fusion 8 bit) with Digital Film Tool's Digital Film Lab, and DV Film Maker. I have done a comparison across them all and have to agree that Vegas can hold its own. I was quite impressed and felt a little stupid having all the tools I do and using DV Film Maker for my film look processing. I guess it was just a conveinience thing. lol.

I know DFX+ is out of most of our budgets (including mine) but I was able to get into a seat of DFX+ cheap by upgrading my Lightwave 3D, BUT.... the Digital Film Tool's Digital Film Lab is an incredible plug-in worth looking into. At the moment it works for After Effects, Digital Fusion/DFX+, and Avid, but one of the guys at DFT's said they are considering a Vegas plug-in. They have quite a few nice plug-ins to help in the "Film Look" crusade. Check em out at http://www.digitalfilmtools.com/html/digitalfilmtools.html.

Take care,
Roy Hinkle

Douglas Spotted Eagle January 22nd, 2004 11:05 PM

Dave,
We did do the world release of DVDWS down in Singapore, and then again at DV Expo in LA.
It's a pretty impressive tool
Macrovision
CSS
8 tracks of audio
32 tracks of subtitles
hidden menu functions
Extra file types (blended mode DVD's)
Audio volume control per file
Fade in/out on audio loops
widescreen and standard screen support
PSD import for menu creation
FINALLY real time preview of motion menus and buttons.
And lots of other tools that are pretty impressive for the cost.
I DON'T recommend you encode in it. The encoder wasn't upgraded much from previous versions.

Paul Jason January 23rd, 2004 10:45 AM

I know this is a bit off topic, DSE said in a earlier post, (I just happen to not be a monster fan of the DVX100. I usually do swim upstream tho)
Just curious, what is it you don't like about that camera?

Dave Largent January 23rd, 2004 12:33 PM

Is special hardware required to implement the
macrovision? Or is it all done in the program, with
just a regular burner?

Brian Mitchell Warshawsky January 23rd, 2004 01:30 PM

Roy wrote:
>>>>>At the moment it works for After Effects, Digital Fusion/DFX+, and Avid, but one of the guys at DFT's said they are considering a Vegas plug-in. >>>

Is there any reason that you cannot first edit in Vegas, and then use DFT's plugins in After Effects (assuming you have access to both)?

Brian

Bruce A. Christenson January 23rd, 2004 04:40 PM

When I've used Vegas' deinterlace to do framegrabs for web preview screenshots, I have always preferred "interpolate" to "blend".

Dave Largent January 23rd, 2004 05:30 PM

I tried a previous poster's recommendation to
put an upper field first on top of a lower field
first, and then deinterlacing. The result was identical to deinterlacing a lower field first by itself.
I'm no Vegas expert so I really don't know
what actually happens when you drag one
clip on top of another. Does it blend them
together at 50% a piece?

Bob Benkosky January 28th, 2004 05:15 PM

That tutorial doesn't like Canon's or anyone elses Movie mode either, but I think if you shott the video well enough, and apply some simple movie quality color corrections, you don't even need 24fps.

I've compared shooting in normal mode, then going to 24fps, and shooting in movie mode, and I think I recall liking movie mode better for some reason. I might run more tests though.

Douglas Spotted Eagle January 29th, 2004 01:42 PM

The reason I don't like Canon's 'frame mode' or other camera's faux or even real progressive modes, is that with all of them, excepting the DVX100, you are giving up resolution or framerate. Sony and JVC do 15fps for their movie mode, Canon shifts pixels. I'd rather blend later than lose so much image information.
Blending fields at 50% is similar to how Vegas does this natively, but not as efficient. It's an older workflow, and necessary for apps that don't have a menu of blending options like Vegas does. I mentioned it in the Vegas book, simply as an alternative to doing things the way they can be natively accomplished.

Roy Hinkle February 2nd, 2004 09:08 AM

Quote:

Is there any reason that you cannot first edit in Vegas, and then use DFT's plugins in After Effects (assuming you have access to both)? Brian
Brian Mitchell Warshawsky,

Sorry I did not reply earlier. Yes, I intend on doing all my edits in Vegas and any post work in Digital Fusion (DFX+). I don't have AE and use DFX+ for my detailed post work.

Since I first posted.... I have performed a number of tests using DFX+, DV Film Maker, and Vegas. I have to agree with others that Vegas performs a quality conversion to 24p. I think DV Film Maker does a good job and seems to produce an image that is not as soft as Vegas. But Vegas seems to win in my opinion.

Here's a question... are there any other Digital Fusion (DFX+) users here? Do you use it along with Vegas? What's your typical workflow?

Roy Hinkle

Simon Wyndham February 2nd, 2004 10:25 AM

Douglas, aren't you giving up framerate or resolution whatever method is used for making something more film like? A Panasonic DVX100 I would have thought was the best option. Full resolution. Yes, 24p (or 25p for PAL), but then film is 24 frames a second. It wouldn't be a film look forum if we were after a 50 or 60i video look!

Further, frame mode loses less resolution than field interpolating, and from what I have seen gives a more detailed picture than frame blending in post as you have suggested. Anyone got any resolution charts comparing the methods?

Douglas Spotted Eagle February 4th, 2004 11:15 PM

I'[ve not done a resolution chart, and yes, you'll lose some resolution, but the biggest problem of ALL editing situations is acquisition. Getting it to tape, or getting it converted from a great source is the critical part, so if you can get as much information on tape (frame/Y/C) then you are much better off doing most everything in post. Somethings can't be pulled in post of course, that's why there's glass. We HAVE done some pretty amazing comparisons of picture, but that's not quite as scientific as a rez chart. I guess I should do one...I'm sure I'd be surprised somewhere in there.

Laurence Kingston August 26th, 2004 01:44 PM

DSE:

I just ordered your book. These posts really got me wanting to learn more.

Michael Best September 9th, 2004 11:49 AM

I don't see 'Interpolate' and 'Deinterlace' in Vegas 5?

How is this accomplished in 5?

Douglas Spotted Eagle September 9th, 2004 01:00 PM

File>Project Properties Deinterlace Mode.

Michael Morlan September 14th, 2004 09:56 AM

I'm coming in late on this thread.

I agree that DVFilm Maker results in serious aliasing on high-contrast, diagonal edges, as well as washing out of highlights. I spoke briefly with DVFilm owner, Marcus van Bavel, at 2004 SXSW and asked about that issue. He made the valid point that Maker has a variety of variable settings to adjust the sharpness (hence aliasing) versus softness. Vegas only provides a fixed setting.

From my own perspective, Vegas "interpolate" de-interlacing results in a softer image. I posted a procedure and some samples of Vegas de-interlacing that can result in recovering that lost detail. That's on this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31760

Michael


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