Horizontal Lines

[roxics]

What are these horizontal lines I notice in all this HDSLR footage I watch? They appear about 3/4 of the way up the frame and always happen with movement.

I notice this on both my home machine and work machine.
At first I thought it was just vimeo, then I noticed it on YouTube as well and figured that maybe it was just flash video compression in general. Then I downloaded and watched Philip Blooms 1080p Dublin footage and it's all over that as well.

Is this just something DSLR footage has? It's pretty unbearable.

UPDATE:
I was able to pull some screen grabs. Only way I could do this though was by shooting my LCD screen with a Canon HV30 then taking snaps in Vegas Pro.
http://www.sobotics.com/hl/

[Green Hornet]

rolling shutter

[Rakesh Jacob]

Can you do some screen grabs and post em so we know exactly what you are talking about?

[roxics]

Can you do some screen grabs and post em so we know exactly what you are talking about?

I don't know if I can. It only happens during motion so when I pause, it goes away. But it's like scan lines almost. Glitchy looking. Rolling shutter might be right. It seems to happen even with HV20 footage on vimeo.

[Paprochy]

If the problem goes away when you pause the video then I think it's safe to assume it that the problem isn't in the footage itself, and has nothing to do with RS. What it looks like is sync issues with your monitor. The frequency your monitor runs at might not by properly syncing with the 24hz(fps) footage and causing tears.

[sblfilms]

It's a problem with all these flash video codecs and variants. Download the original file (if available on Vimeo) and it typically isn't there.

[Michael Olsen]

Yep. This is either a problem with the flash codecs or with the computer. I noticed the same lines and was worried. After downloading the footage and watching on a PC and on the PS3 to an HDTV, they have completely disappeared.

[roxics]

Yep. This is either a problem with the flash codecs or with the computer. I noticed the same lines and was worried. After downloading the footage and watching on a PC and on the PS3 to an HDTV, they have completely disappeared.

See, I thought the same thing as well. But I did download the 1080p file and it does the same thing. This is both at home and on my work computer. Two totally different computer/monitor setups.

Well I guess it's good to know it's not these cameras.

[mhood]

Not such good news for folks producing stuff for Web delivery though...

[Zim]

That would be really bad news.
It should be a wait and see thing. I'm probably going to get the D300s. Probably. Still waiting for more to come out before I buy. Same with the 7D. People jump way to fast.


Not such good news for folks producing stuff for Web delivery though...

[sblfilms]

Not such good news for folks producing stuff for Web delivery though...


It doesn't matter what camera you shoot on, flash codecs to date all have irritating shearing issues that you can't do anything about other than re-encode until you get one that doesn't shear. This isn't a particularly efficient way of uploading content :grin:

[roxics]

Ok, I finally got some screenshots. Updated my first post here as a result.

Here are the screenshots.

http://www.sobotics.com/hl/

See the horizontal lines? They happen during any kind of movement. Sometimes worse than other times. This is taken from the 1080p H.264 file I downloaded of Philip Blooms Dublin People 7D footage.

[Barry_Green]

That's just shearing from your computer being not fast enough to play back the footage without shearing. There's nothing wrong with the footage at all.

[roxics]

That's just shearing from your computer being not fast enough to play back the footage without shearing. There's nothing wrong with the footage at all.

Really? This computer I taped this from is a 2.4 Quad Core with 4 gigs of ram? How fast of a computer do we need?

[sblfilms]

Oh, quicktime also shears h.264/avc pretty bad. Seriously, you can download 1080p trailers from Apple's website that will shear in QT. I just played the video in QT and then in VLC. VLC was perfect.

[mhood]

Really? This computer I taped this from is a 2.4 Quad Core with 4 gigs of ram? How fast of a computer do we need?

I'm starting to fear that the whole AVC shebang is a devious plot to sell computers.

[jls4]

Really? This computer I taped this from is a 2.4 Quad Core with 4 gigs of ram? How fast of a computer do we need?

Try a 3.33GHz Quad core! LOL

I was doing some research on computers. I just bought my wife a 3.0Ghx Duo and I'm about to upgrade to a 3.0Ghz Quad. Most computers, especially windows have problems with multi cores. Multi cores are faster but they aren't better. A 10Ghz chip would be better than a Quad 3.3Ghz. The reason why is that all programs don't utilize the cores well and multi-processing is still very "new". (my backgound is in computers)

The reason we have cores now is because Intel and AMD couldn't figure out how to make a chip beyond 3.3Ghz that would be stable and wouldn't melt. So they came up with Multi Cores.

What I've learned is to get the fastest 3.0 / 3.3Ghz with multi cores as possible. Depending on your setup, a 3.0Ghz Duo could be faster than a 2.4Ghz quad for some applications. I ran into it for the first time over a year ago when my wife's computer at time Single 2.0Ghz was running some apps as fast as mine 2.0Ghz Duo. After a few weeks of research found the above info out.

Not sure how Quicktime is implementing Multi-core, but this "could" be the problem especially without a graphics card designed for motion graphics and NOT videogames. (most are now designed for video games)

[Eddy Robinson]

It's the computers/codecs - I have the same problem on a similar AMD Quad core machine. Download the original footage on something and then convert a small section to an intraframe codec like AVI or so and it'll be fine. Remember there's quite a bit of CPU-bashing going on to convert it from h.264 on the fly.

That it goes away when you pause is the best clue - looking at the footage frame-by-frame in After Effects or so you can see how clean it is. Incidentally, the same problem can look like CMOS jello on some shots but again, it's not really an issue.

[roxics]

Ok. Well it's good to know all of this. Thank you everyone. I was getting really curious as to what was going on. I've seen jello and I've heard about rolling shutter, but I was like "why isn't anyone mentioning these lines that are so annoying." :)

[Kholi]

Roxics - Download VLC VideoLan Video Player, should fix that for you.

[John Caballero]

Philip Bloom's latest footage from Dublin was showing that problem. I downloaded the QuickTime version and just like magic it wasn't there. the internet is a wonderful thing but it also has its little problems and we all should be aware of that.

[roxics]

Roxics - Download VLC VideoLan Video Player, should fix that for you.

I've got VLC. I'm on my work machine. Video is what I do for a living. But VLC is still showing the same problem.

However I did convert about 30 seconds to NTSC Widescreen DV AVI and the problem disappeared. So it's definitely a playback issue with formats that don't use all real frames.

[Kholi]

Strange. I used VLC and it disappeared on my laptop. It's generally a hardware and software issue. As in quicktime just sucks for video playback in general.

[sblfilms]

Maybe you need to replace the codec with a newer or older version. Playing in VLC both on Windows 7 and Snow Leopard fixed the shearing that was going on in QT on both platforms as well. Playing through my PS3 also resulted in no shearing. Peculiar!

[roxics]

Strange. I used VLC and it disappeared on my laptop. It's generally a hardware and software issue. As in quicktime just sucks for video playback in general.

Turns out my VLC was old. 0.94 I just updated to 1.01 and it plays it back just fine without the shearing. I didn't realize VLC got better. For a while there it was only getting worse on Windows.

[Michael Olsen]

Mystery solved!

[Ian-T]

Turns out my VLC was old. 0.94 I just updated to 1.01 and it plays it back just fine without the shearing. I didn't realize VLC got better. What the P-Funk!!!??? Snap...thanks to this thread I realize that my VLC is way out of date. I got .8.6a. No wonder it was pissin me off. Oh well....I'm off to upgrade.

[sblfilms]

Jeez fellas, gotta keep the software up to date. :)

[Isaac_Brody]

Amateurs. :)

[mattsand]

vlc, that looks like quicktime player, or did you skin it? are you sure this isn't a sync issue with your monitor? do you have multiple monitors with different refresh? have you disabled vsync to hunt better benchmark scores by any chance?

EDIT: should have read the last page i guess, but my comment could still be interesting for reference

[Greypawn Films]

So it's safe to say that once you burn footage to a DVD the shearing disappears right?

[ydgmdlu]

Well, the problem was never with the footage in the first place. So yes.