I work on restoring old films, and I use FCP 7 for editing purposes. We have received 2 batches of films from a studio in Russia that exhibit a bizarre interlacing issue. I am located in the United States. The footage came to us on 25fps PAL Digibeta. We are capturing the Digibeta footage as uncompressed 10 bit and then transcoding that to ProRes 4:2:2. The problem is that every single frame has very visible interlacing. It looks really bad on diagonal edge lines. The interlacing problem is visible no matter if you are looking at the Digibeta playing or the files that we create. It looks terrible with certain motion and also adds a rough stair-step to edges. Deinterlacing the footage using FCP's deinterlace filter does an amazing job of getting rid of this problem, but still leaves some harsh edge lines occasionally. I have included a jpeg photo example of the problem. We are able to use this footage, but we are trying to figure out what went wrong in Russia. We have sent the studio there this sample picture as well as a few others today. We plan on getting more films transferred there and we don't want to continue seeing this issue.
On top of the interlacing issue, the film is also very noisy. The noise is very visible in shadows. The transfer almost looks like it was done years ago on 1 inch tape and then recorded on Digibeta, but the studio insists they just did the transfer recently. They say they are using a Rank Flying Spot Scanner. So my question is, does anyone have any idea what can cause such ugly interlacing? Thank you for your help.
3867_stukasinterlacing2.jpg.zip
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