60i, to 60p, played back 24p at 40%

srfer919

srfer919

Active member
After browsing the forums, I am still having a problem with this process. I've been experimenting a lot and to no avail.

I'm using FCP 6 and Compressor. Source material was shot in HDV 60i, at 1/120.

I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. In compressor I use the 1080i60 quicktime codec, set the framerate to 59.97, turn all frame controls to best settings, and output fields to progressive. Am I using the wrong codec?

Now, assuming I correctly converted the 60i in compressor, I drop the 60p into a 24fps timeline, and set the speed to 40% with frame blending off and render. Once it's done, I preview the footage frame by frame and Im still gettting a bunch of copied frames. Each frame is not unique.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you
 
I think your mistake was to choose an interlaced codec. It's easy enough to make a custom progressive 60p codec, at non-standard frame sizes too.

My own recipe is to create a unique frame size in Compressor and make sure that it's rendering to a *progressive* frame, not interlaced fields. I usually make it a 1600x900 frame at 59.94p, and output to QT uncompressed codec. I then scale the rendered clips back to 1920x1080 via QT player and export again, and it looks really good. From there, I take the rendered 59.94 clips into Cinema Tools and conform the frame rate to 23.98. I prefer to have the clips processed and playing back at the proper speed before I integrate them in a 23.98 sequence.

Basically, I get better results by not going full 1080 59.94p via Compressor. By downrezzing slightly to 1600x900 and then scaling back to 1080, for some reason it looked better. Little-to-no aliased jaggies and it intercuts incredibly well with 24F footage. Fluid slowmo without any perceivable resolution drop.
 
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That really helps out a lot. I thought it was silly to be using an interlaced codec, but I didn't know what to use. I tried the h.294 and got the same results. I'll try your recipe tonight and see how it goes. Thank you very much for sharing. I really like the downrezzing and pre-conforming idea also. Seems like a safer way to do it.

I'm sure it will work now. Thank you!
 
srfer919 said:
That really helps out a lot. I thought it was silly to be using an interlaced codec, but I didn't know what to use.
Click to expand...

It's an easy mistake. The important thing to recognize is that Compressor needs to be told to extract each interlaced field into its own standalone frame and reconstruct the 60i field order into a true progressive sequence. (60p) It can't do this if you're essentially telling it to deinterlace to progressive and then reinterlace it to a 60i codec/format.

Another thing--HDV is already so heavily compressed, so if you want to maintain quality throughout the chain, it's very important not to recompress the footage wherever possible. That's why I usually go with uncompressed, Sheervideo codec or ProRes when doing stuff like this.
Good luck and let me know if the tips helped. :)
 
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I tried your settings and my footage has greatly improved. I found one setting that I set to "best" was giving my video big blocky artifacts and when set to "better", cleaned them up.

I'm still having the copied frames issue though. Is this normal? It still looks really good, and 10 times better than what I was getting, (even looks slower) but as I tap the arrow key and preview each frame individually, I still get 2 or 3 frames that are exactly the same.

Here's what I did:

Import 60i as normal.

Export in compressor:
-Apple prores (HQ) /59.94 codec

-Frame settings set to "best" except for the one deinterlacing setting was switched to "better" to fix the artifacting.

-Output fields set to progressive

-Custom frame size 1600 x 900

-Square pixel aspect ratio.

Open in quicktime export as apple prores 59.94, 1920 x 1080 frame size.

Opened that with cinema tools, conformed 59.94 to 23.98

Imported into FCP, dropped in 23.98 timeline with no problems, set to 40%, preview, and it still looks way better than I normally could get my slow motion to look, but it still has duplicated frames. Is that normal? I thought I've seen the same process done without that happening.

Thank you
 
I've had good results with these settings. I've also found that although I can import a 60i HDV QT clip and export without problem, the speed of conversion is quicker if you first convert the HDV material to uncompressed, ProRes etc. Compressor likes separate, distinct frames without having to calculate GOP's, etc.

Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 1600
Height: 900
Pixel aspect ratio: Square
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: 59.94
Frame Controls On:
Retiming: (Best) High quality Motion Compensated
Resize Filter: Statistical Prediction
Deinterlace Filter: Best (Motion Compensated)
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Progressive
Codec Type: Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2
Multi-pass: Off, frame reorder: Off
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 50
Min. Spatial quality: 0
Temporal quality: 0
Min. temporal quality: 0
 
Ok, I'm almost possitive I've tried those settings before, but I'll do a side by side check tonight and try again. If I'm still having problems I'll check my sequence settings in FCP because that's the only other thing that I can think of that would alter the outcome.

Thanks a ton for the help. I'm almsot there!
 
srfer919 said:
IImported into FCP, dropped in 23.98 timeline with no problems, set to 40%, preview, and it still looks way better than I normally could get my slow motion to look, but it still has duplicated frames. Is that normal? I thought I've seen the same process done without that happening.
Click to expand...

You shouldn't need to set it to 40% playback, as the clip is already playing at 40% speed (if you've converted it properly).

Try turning the speed setting off in FCP and then step through it.
 
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The reason I prefer conforming the speed in CT is because it avoids another round of compression, whereas if you set the speed of a 60p clip to 40% in FCP, it needs to render, and therefore compress again at some point.
 
Yeah, I understand it now. It's working too! It seems my computer doesn't want to play the full res version of it, but I compressed it a little and it plays fine. Do you have this problem? It will play like the first 2 seconds then freeze up. I thought I had a quick enough computer... Oh well.

Anyways the final outcome looks great! Thank you very much. I'll post some videos that I do with it soon.
 
srfer919 said:
Yeah, I understand it now. It's working too! It seems my computer doesn't want to play the full res version of it, but I compressed it a little and it plays fine. Do you have this problem? It will play like the first 2 seconds then freeze up. I thought I had a quick enough computer... Oh well.

Anyways the final outcome looks great! Thank you very much. I'll post some videos that I do with it soon.
Click to expand...

Yeah, unless you have a super-fast RAID and terabytes of storage, you can't really play the uncompressed clip smoothly.

My workflow method is to simply drop the uncompressed slowmo clip back into a 24F HDV timeline and render as needed. When the edit's done, I'll make a 23.98 ProRes or Sheer codec sequence and simply copy/paste (nest) the HDV edit into one of these timelines and output from there.

Basically, I don't mind HDV editing, but I prefer using an intermediate codec for final output. It can make a difference in quality.
 
Hi guys

The info in this post has been really useful in helping me to convert my A1 interlaced footage to progressive using compressor but I am not getting the results as far as slow mo goes.

I have followed all the steps and everything seems fine but when I drop the the clip into the 24F HDV timeline it just plays back at normal speed.

I am in Australia so the footage is originally 50i instead of 60i.

What could I be doing wrong?
 
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