Best order for Looks, Denoiser, Deinterlace, Deartifactor

J

Janissaire

New member
Hi All,

Wondering if I could get some tips on the best order for post.

I'm converting footage from a GH1 using NeoScene... I choose pulldown removal, 420 to 422 and Fix Chroma, I save to CF 422 mov.

After finishing a sequence in Final Cut is where I get confused. I want to get the best image possible out of the CF 422 codec. I understand I should have converted to Pro Res, but I have limited space. Should I use Magic Bullet Looks, then either Denoiser, Deinterlace or Deartifactor ... or vice versa, combination of a few?

Any help is much appreicated.
 
The best possible image is one that goes through the least amount of intermediary processing steps that are necessary. Assuming your footage was clean to begin with, you could forgo the denoising which could kill detail, and deartifacting would also be unnecessary. And if you edited using a noninterlaced sequence (which you should with GH1 progressive footage), then deinterlacing is an unnecessary and actually detrimental step. MB Looks adds a certain eye candy to video most of the time, by mere virtue of using Looks (properly) your footage should already look better than the original clips. Watch your final export and trust your eyes - if it looks good, then you've done it right.

But if your original footage is less than stellar, then do your image cleanup first (denoising, deartifacting), followed by CC. Keep the amount of cleaning steps to a minimum and accept that some image defects cannot be removed without doing harm to the desirable parts of your footage.
 
Thank you for the insightful and quick reply htinla.

I have made some room on my hard drive. Do you think I should re-convert and choose ProRes HQ instead of Cineform 422? ... I did a test and to my eyes it seems that ProRes HQ looks better.
 
If hard drive capacity and the extra time and effort are not issues to you, then satisfy your eyes and go ahead with it. I've never done a quality comparison between CF and PR, so I can't comment on if one is better than the other. As a user of ProRes 422 LT, I haven't seen degradation of GH1 footage using LT (of all the PR versions, only Proxy seems to degrade the image - and slightly at that), so using HQ should be a fine choice.
 
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