"Optimizing" Squeeze Mode for 24AP? (DVX100B)

L

lsc9x

Member
Hey folks! Trying to make some 24ap footage look better. Any help is appreciated.

OK, so I have been playing around with the DVX100b for a while now and I am shooting in 24AP in squeeze mode and I am noticing some really bad aliasing in the 16:9 format when importing footage into Premiere CS5. Yes, I am importing with 23.97 (or whatever the 24p setting is) at 16x9 format.

The pixelation I can live with, but the aliasing really makes the images look like hell. It is especially noticeable when filming round objects such as the rims of glasses sitting on a table. It looks like what happens when you take an uncompressed *.bmp file and compress it to a *.jpeg file with low quality compression. You get lots of areas that look like "stairs" in the image created by aliasing. Premiere says that I am playing the footage back at full resolution with no compression, and the project is set to widescreen, 24p. This "aliasing" is also happening with strong horizontal lines that are shot at an angle as well.

My theory is that these aliasing issues are happening because of the way squeeze mode distorts the image hitting the CCD at 4:3 and then converting it back to 16:9.

- Question is: Is there any way to fix this in camera? I haven't mucked around with the Scene File settings yet. Just wondering if anyone has more experience with this, maybe has some tips to modify the basic "Advanced" scene file?

- Would shooting in letterbox mode help? (I am going for squeeze mainly due to the number of posts that suggest that squeeze is slightly better than letterbox when trying to shoot for 16:9 format.)

- Is there something else I should be looking at?

Thanks again folks!

Peace.
 
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It's not v-detail, it's ... wait, I can't remember off hand, but it's one of the last scene file settings, and it needs (NEEDS) to be set to THIN, not MID or THICK.

Secondly, make sure your preview window in CS5 is set to full resolution (right-click it to change the options).
 
Thanks for the quick response! Unfortunately, I already have V Detail Frequency set to "thin" and my playback window in Premiere is set to "Full" on both playback and still resolution. I tried downsizing from "Fit" window to "100%", which displays the video on a pixel for pixel basis and that didn't do anything to get rid of the aliasing.

I'm going to try playing around with the V-detail level and get back to this later. If you think of anything else, let me know!
 
I ve always had great results with squeeze mode at 25p and I ve always had horrible images with the symptoms you re describing with squeeze mode at 50i...
So I dont understand what could be wrong since you re shooting 24p...may be something in the settings?
 
I think I have narrowed down the problem. After playing around with some of the detail settings (and other settings) in 24ap I am now getting much sharper images overall (good!) but I also noticed that the most severe aliasing is still happening with white highlights contrasting next to dark or even black colored objects. The only thing I can think of here is white "blowout", so my next test run will be with the "knee" setting set to "low" (80%) to try and force down the white falloff. If I can reduce the blowouts, it will probably clear up the edge details.

I'll keep you posted!

A couple of other things I noticed:

- Jacking up "detail" setting really sharpened up the picture, but also
- Increasing detail coring seems to have got rid of a lot of "fuzz" artifacts (pixelation) in the picture as well.

All in all, the footage is coming out 100% better than the generic settings. Go figure...
 
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OK, I have finally figured out why my DV looks like crap on my computer. It has nothing to do with the camera.

I started noticing that when I play back the individual clips with Quicktime, they look great, but when I pull them into the editor (either FCP or Premiere) the software is killing the resolution. Yeah, I set the windows to playback at full quality and it doesn't make a difference. Sometimes the video looks correct, sometimes it doesn't. Smells like a video driver problem to me, but when I dug further into the problem, FCP is reporting that the video is set at "Medium Quality" after importing into Premiere. WTF, software? Why would anyone want to import at medium quality?

I'm going to trash the video capture in Premiere and re-import using FCP and see if Apple can get this right. The next trick is to get my DVX to play nice in the sandbox with my iMac. Last time I tried this, FCP couldn't control the camera at all which is why I decided to give Premiere a shot.

Back to the drawing board...
 
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