Auto DeInterlace in Color
by Kenneth Scicluna
on
Aug 19, 2008 at 1:19:28 pm
Guys,
we'd desperately like Color _not_ to automatically deinterlace our clips, and yet we can't find a way to work around the prob.
In brief, we work mostly in 1080i50 HDV. When we send a timeline to Color, either some, or all of the clips (depending on the weather?!) are deinterlaced automatically. Deinterlace Renders and Deinterlace Previews, under Project Settings, are always disabled. So is the Deinterlace option under the Settings 2 tab, for _all_ the clips.
We've checked the source material -- it is still interlaced when it enters Color, but the clips are definitely deint'd when they come out.
Since we hate the way Color merges both fields together, we'd rather use AE to do the job when we want to deint something.
We have a 2.8GHz eight-core Xeon, with 4Gb RAM, an ATI Radeon HD2600, Leopard 10.5.4, and Color 1.0.2.
We'd have trashed the preferences, but could not find any.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Floh Peters on Aug 19, 2008 at 2:23:38 pm
Most likely your deinterlacing happens in the ColorFX room (or in Geometry). If you want to bring interlaced footage through ColorFX you need to split it up in the beginning with 2 deinterlace nodes, apply 2 copies of your ColorFX tree and then reinterlace it at the bottom of your trees.
If you are not using ColorFX or Geometry, then most likely something else is wrong with your clips. Compare one of the clips that goes through Color without deinterlacing to one that deinterlaces. Are they different in any way (framesize, codec,...)?
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Kenneth Scicluna on Aug 19, 2008 at 3:13:26 pm
Hi Floh,
thanks for replying.
Taking the current project -- a 30sec job -- as an example, all of our clips originated from the same camera, tape, and sequence, and all are 1080i50 HDV.
The sequence was sent to Color in one go.
We had two particular clips -- A, with no colour correction but with Film Look Color FX, and B with colour correction and Film Look Color FX. Both were getting the deint treatment by Color.
I split the Color FX as per your suggestion (had missed that bit in the manual). Clip A promptly got its fields back, B was still deinterlaced. I removed all colour correction (we only had curve adjustments in Primary In & Out and no Secondaries) and still i'm not getting the fields back!
To add insult to injury, i applied some curve adjustments in Primary In to Clip A, and the fields were retained!
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Floh Peters on Aug 19, 2008 at 3:21:26 pm
[Kenneth Scicluna]"To add insult to injury, i applied some curve adjustments in Primary In to Clip A, and the fields were retained!
"
You can use all primaries and secondaries without damaging fields, since all calculations done there do not "cross" lines. If you have e.g. a blur it will calculate across several lines, and since Color is not built to handle Interlaced material it will mix up lines there. Color adjustments do not have this limitations.
[Kenneth Scicluna]"I split the Color FX as per your suggestion (had missed that bit in the manual). Clip A promptly got its fields back, B was still deinterlaced. I removed all colour correction (we only had curve adjustments in Primary In & Out and no Secondaries) and still i'm not getting the fields back!
"
I would bet that there still is something wrong with your setup in the ColorFX node tree for clip b.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by walter biscardi on Aug 19, 2008 at 3:21:47 pm
[Kenneth Scicluna]"Taking the current project -- a 30sec job -- as an example, all of our clips originated from the same camera, tape, and sequence, and all are 1080i50 HDV.
The sequence was sent to Color in one go. "
HDV is not supported in Color. It sort of, kind of works, but is not properly supported by Color. Change your files to ProRes or DVCPro HD and then send that timeline into Color.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Joseph Owens on Aug 19, 2008 at 5:07:48 pm
The thing with HDV is....
I'm with Walter. Its not exiting from COLOR as HDV, that's for sure, for starters, anyway...so why not go in with something that the application actually likes? Like ProRes, which doesn't have all that i-frame nonsense.
Over the past couple of years, I've seen so may inconsistent behaviours with it, its a complete no-brainer to convert it to something else in the same split second as it comes in the building. No wonder every broadcaster on the planet considers it to be a consumer format and WILL NOT ACCEPT IT.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by walter biscardi on Aug 20, 2008 at 11:21:53 am
[Jason Porthouse]"Don't bother exporting and re-importing - just stick 'em in a ProRes timeline, render and send to Color. It'll work fine. "
This doesn't really solve anything because Color refers to the original media, not the rendered media. Just putting the HDV clips into a ProRes timeline will create ProRes Rendered media, but the original media is still HDV. So you'll still have the same issues when you go to Color.
Rendering HDV in a ProRes timeline is only good for final output, not for sending to Color. We convert all of our HDV material to DVCPro HD during ingest, edit in a DVCPro HD timeline, send that to Color and then have Color render out to ProRes HQ. The PreRes render is a new thing we've added to our workflow in the past few months.
Prior to that, we just rendered in DVCPro HD in Color as well and that has worked really well too.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Jason Porthouse on Aug 20, 2008 at 3:47:41 pm
Umm... that's interesting. I've round-tripped that way before and not had the interlacing issues... maybe it's a PAL/NTSC thing? I'll have to delve deeper...
If that is the case, I've obviously misunderstood somewhere along the line - so sorry for the bum steer Kenneth, and thanks for clarifying that Walter!
Jason
_________________________________
Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you'll be a mile away. And have his shoes.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Saul Budd on Aug 29, 2008 at 12:32:44 pm
By any chance have you dropped your HDV material into a Pro Res or Uncomp sequence before sending to Color?
If so, then you might have fallen victim to the following :
HDV 1080i50 has a "true" frame size and pixel aspect ratio of 1440x1080, when you drop this into an uncompressed or Pro Res HD timeline with a frame size of 1920x1080 and a square pixel aspect ratio, FCP applies a scale of 133.33 and a distort of -33.33.
When you send this to Color, Color has a rounding error converting it back to square pixels resulting in a scale value of 1.000003 and an aspect ratio of something between 1.000000 and 1.000001 in the geometry room. (Bug number 1)
Anything which has a scale, aspect ratio, or rotation applied in the geometry room WILL BE DEINTERLACED (and badly) by Color (Bug number 2). You can tell when a clip will be deinterlaced because it has a red border in the geometry room. Resetting geometry is not enough, you need to reset the geometry, save the project, close and reopen.
Bug number 1 + Bug number 2 = FUBAR
This bug caused us to have to redo the render for an hour long HD programme ... ouch !
The "solution" is to "Reset Geometry", "Copy To All", save, close, reopen, re-render. Any geometry settings which you actually needed will need to be recreated in FCP (usually cut and paste from the initial sequence)
Oh, and as you've no doubt figured out by now, the "Film Look" node also deinterlaces your footage ... I guess they think that this is implicit in the name, but it's not mentioned in manual, nor is it one of the configurable options in an otherwise useful node. The workaround if you want the look of gamma change and grain without the shoddy deinterlace is to either use a combination of the film-grain and gamma or curve nodes, or to use the deinterlace & reinterlace nodes as suggested in the other posts.
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Kevin Johnson on Sep 2, 2008 at 4:09:44 pm
Having never done a color correction for a client with Color, I thought a 2 cut talking to camera :30 spot would be the perfect place to start. The workflow seemed to work perfectly until we got back into FCP to view are renders...
We had been working in ProRes HQ SD, from DVCPRO50 anamorphic source material. The renders came back field merged, which looked terrible coming from 24p with pulldown. Had to resort to the 'ole 3-way since the deadline was approaching.
Read some of these posts and did a little testing of my own:
The following would come back correctly interlaced with 3:2:
An anamorphic clip in an anamorphic sequence
an anamorphic clip in a 4x3 sequence without a -33.33 distort
an anamorphic clip with a -33.33 distort in a 4x3 sequence with the reset geometry trick as above...when you return to fcp, all attributes will have to be reapplied...this is fine for a :30, but I can't imagine this working on a feature with various source materials, SD, HD, etc...
an anamorphic clip with a -33.33 distort and the deinterlace node tree as mentioned above did not seem to work...
Anyone seem to find the best workflow? Since the majority of our work is :30 political spots, we try to downconvert letterboxed when possible, so this shouldn't be a problem (doesn't work for DVCPro50 though). Having to reapply attributes by removing them in color doesn't seem to cut it for me. Cutting in anamorphic doesn't work as well since we use the letterbox in 4x3 for additional text elements...
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Saul Budd on Sep 2, 2008 at 4:36:34 pm
Hi Kevin,
I had an archive-based project (3 x 60 min) today on which about two thirds of the shots were ARC'd 4x3 material in a 16x9 sequence.
When I asked the online-editor/colorist how he'd feel about copying attributes for every ARC'd shot post-grade (couldn't just paste to all in one go because each shot had been individually repositioned vertically) he said he'd probably rather kill himself.
So, after checking that the ARCing was final and that we didn't need to make any 4:3 versions, I decided to make a quicktime of the entire sequence and add edits (see the Biscardi tutorial, or perhaps try notching with an EDL). Perhaps this workflow is the best for your production.
I've just had a flash of inspiration and am going to try figuring out a workaround involving sending two sequences to Color, one with scales/distorts and one without, taking the renders from one and the XML from the other ... I'll let you know how it works out (if it does, you'll probably hear the cry of "Eureka!" all the way from London!)
Re: Auto DeInterlace in Color by Kevin Johnson on Sep 3, 2008 at 1:11:48 am
Saul,
Thank you for your insight. Creating a self-contained would probably be the easiest for our workflow. I've tried notching by edl before and couldn't get it to work right, but will try again sometime when the need arises to return to Color. Let me know how your test works out.
Tested it on the first two minutes of a DVCPRO HD sequence, the project I mentioned is starting grading on Friday so I'll have the opportunity to test it in anger. Unfortunately I'll be away for a week after that so I'll post the results when I get back if no-one else has had the chance to test it.
