ericmanche
New member
Hello,
I’m a long-time reader, first-time poster.
I have a question regarding an issue I’ve been running into doing special effects work for a feature film. The effects are being done in After Effects CS3, and the effects themselves comprise a large portion of the film (probably about 25 percent of all shots are vfx shots). We’re doing explosions, laser blasts, earthquakes, head decapitations, compositing, and slo-down. I’m nearing completion with effects, and am finally now beginning to deal with this issue.
We shot the film with a DVX-100B, on 24p NON-ADVANCED and are editing with Final Cut Pro. In order to bring the shots into After Effects, I exported a Quicktime reference movie out of FCP (in order to maintain correct in and out points) and then brought that clip into After Effects.
Here is where the problem begins.
In order to keep the correct aspect ration and frame rate, I had been interpreting the QT footage with these After Effects specs:
CONFORM TO FRAME RATE: 29.97
SEPARATE FIELDS : LOWER FIELDS FIRST
REMOVE PULLDOWN: OFF
PIXEL ASPECT RATIO: D1/DV NTSC WIDESCREEN 1.2
These specs served me well, but brought down the image quality slightly. Other than the image quality loss, the interlacing and frame rate worked in conjunction with our FCP timeline and our raw footage, The only times we ran into any problems was when we did a time-ramp or slow-down in both FCP and After Effects. When we applied any kind of time-adjustment, the entire frame jittered up and down, being most obvious in the widescreen bars. As a temporary fix, I had been blowing up the image slightly and masking off a new widescreen bar. This works well enough, but the loss of quality from a blow-up is undesirable.
I decided to experiment more with my interpret footage settings. On a shot in which I was doing an After Effects slo-down, I tried to set my REMOVE PULLDOWN to SSWWW.
I was surprised to see a crystal clear image with no jitter or noticeable de-interlaced frames. I looked through my After Effects timeline at previous shots that were referencing the same Quicktime media and saw a noticeable increase in image quality. Lines and pixels were clear and less blurry and grainy, as they had been using the previous INTERPRET FOOTAGE settings.
So, thinking I had found the solution to all of my FCP/After Effects problems, I went into another scene and applied the same settings to that Quicktime reference movie. This is where things got strange.
From this QT reference movie, I had about 10 effects shots that were referencing it. Of those 10, half of them looked great from this SSWWW pulldown change, but the other half resulted in clear pictures – but distracting deinterlaced frames, where the upper and lower fields were de-registered. This doesn’t make any sense to me because these shots were all shot using the same DVX settings, and uploaded into FCP using the same import settings.
We’re just about wrapping this movie up and I’m desperate to get a correct answer for this. I’ve talked to a few people who had recommended the initial settings I used, but after seeing the image quality improvement that the SSWWW pulldown settings SOMETIMES gave me, I’m hesitant to go any further before figuring this out.
Has anyone here run onto any similar situations? Does anyone know why only some of the shots would be plagued with these nasty video interlace artifacts? I would appreciate any kind of response!
Thanks,
Eric Manche
I’m a long-time reader, first-time poster.
I have a question regarding an issue I’ve been running into doing special effects work for a feature film. The effects are being done in After Effects CS3, and the effects themselves comprise a large portion of the film (probably about 25 percent of all shots are vfx shots). We’re doing explosions, laser blasts, earthquakes, head decapitations, compositing, and slo-down. I’m nearing completion with effects, and am finally now beginning to deal with this issue.
We shot the film with a DVX-100B, on 24p NON-ADVANCED and are editing with Final Cut Pro. In order to bring the shots into After Effects, I exported a Quicktime reference movie out of FCP (in order to maintain correct in and out points) and then brought that clip into After Effects.
Here is where the problem begins.
In order to keep the correct aspect ration and frame rate, I had been interpreting the QT footage with these After Effects specs:
CONFORM TO FRAME RATE: 29.97
SEPARATE FIELDS : LOWER FIELDS FIRST
REMOVE PULLDOWN: OFF
PIXEL ASPECT RATIO: D1/DV NTSC WIDESCREEN 1.2
These specs served me well, but brought down the image quality slightly. Other than the image quality loss, the interlacing and frame rate worked in conjunction with our FCP timeline and our raw footage, The only times we ran into any problems was when we did a time-ramp or slow-down in both FCP and After Effects. When we applied any kind of time-adjustment, the entire frame jittered up and down, being most obvious in the widescreen bars. As a temporary fix, I had been blowing up the image slightly and masking off a new widescreen bar. This works well enough, but the loss of quality from a blow-up is undesirable.
I decided to experiment more with my interpret footage settings. On a shot in which I was doing an After Effects slo-down, I tried to set my REMOVE PULLDOWN to SSWWW.
I was surprised to see a crystal clear image with no jitter or noticeable de-interlaced frames. I looked through my After Effects timeline at previous shots that were referencing the same Quicktime media and saw a noticeable increase in image quality. Lines and pixels were clear and less blurry and grainy, as they had been using the previous INTERPRET FOOTAGE settings.
So, thinking I had found the solution to all of my FCP/After Effects problems, I went into another scene and applied the same settings to that Quicktime reference movie. This is where things got strange.
From this QT reference movie, I had about 10 effects shots that were referencing it. Of those 10, half of them looked great from this SSWWW pulldown change, but the other half resulted in clear pictures – but distracting deinterlaced frames, where the upper and lower fields were de-registered. This doesn’t make any sense to me because these shots were all shot using the same DVX settings, and uploaded into FCP using the same import settings.
We’re just about wrapping this movie up and I’m desperate to get a correct answer for this. I’ve talked to a few people who had recommended the initial settings I used, but after seeing the image quality improvement that the SSWWW pulldown settings SOMETIMES gave me, I’m hesitant to go any further before figuring this out.
Has anyone here run onto any similar situations? Does anyone know why only some of the shots would be plagued with these nasty video interlace artifacts? I would appreciate any kind of response!
Thanks,
Eric Manche
