deinterlaced output is not deinterlaced

"It seems strange that they would opt to use clean aperture by default in a process that inherently involves less and less analogue video as time goes by."

Researching CA i found the same opinion. Then reading a Digital Handbook, i found the same definition of CA but with the word "analog" replaced by the word "digital." The QT docs make a big deal of it, but i've never seen any bad edge stuff.

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I made a horrible error in my tests of DVCPTOHD, but I learned a bunch too. See next post. So I am less sure of my CA explanation. Questions for you:

1) What frame- size are the 1080i, 720p, and 540p exports you make from 09 if you use the UPPER options? If you use the LOWER options?

2) You say you are NOW able to export 1080i without "problems." How are you doing this now? How did you do it before?

3) Why do you think QT is broken and will thus be fixed?

My experience exactly.

Shooting at 30p rather than 60i or 24p makes the QT export look great. I can live very nicely with the 30p look -- a little smoother than 24, a little more "film-like" than 60i.

The only question is, is this the right way to capture video going forward? Is Apple going to "fix" the 24p/60i issue?

Again, many thanks for the thorough and detailed postings here. What a great education!

I haven't tried the 24p option. Do you still get jaggies when recording @24p? I will do some tests later today...

Yes.

THIS MAY BE OR MAY NOT BE VERY USEFUL.

In 08 there is an odd problem with "actual size" playback AND QT export.

It seems iM looks at the first clip -- or maybe all clips -- to learn what the biggest frame-size is. This is how it defines "actual size" for playback. It also uses this data during export.

This works fine if you mix FullHD with 720p because both are Square pixel formats. (I do this all the time.) But, if any video clips do not have identical pixel ratios -- then scaling is done.

DVCPRO-HD is 960x720 much like HDV is 1440x1080.

When your timeline has only DVCPRO-HD iM08 scales it to "full-screen" even if your Prefs say use Actual Size. It looks really bad. Moreover on export, even using the UPPER 720p option, it uses Clean Aperture. And, the export looks just as bad.

This can be fixed by placing any true 1280x720 clip as the first clip -- maybe any clip. This seems to make iM very happy. Now playback is Actual Size and the DVCPRO-HD clips looks great. Likewise, the export looks great and Clean Aperture is not used!

1) this is nice because DVCPRO-HD plays more smoothly than AIC, and its gamma perfectly matches the gamma of my DSLR. (Converting to AIC or ProRes darkens the image by almost 2-stops -- yet another QT bug.) I'm happy.

2) but, It makes me wonder if the iM09 problem is that Clean Aperture is being used on captured footage. Assume that iM09 as it captures video from a camcorder applies Clean Aperture to the file it is writing to disk -- and adds a CA tag. That would mean 1080i would be cropped and scaled which would introduce crap in all 1080i video. However, 1080p video would be fine and so would video converted to 960x540. Progressive video can be scaled without problem.

Someone should check the 1080i and 540p files in the iEvent folder.

Now, assume iM09 exports just like iM08. The frame-sizes would be as usual if one uses the UPPER settings and DEINTERLACE would still be working. In other words, no QT Export bug. There will be inherent crap in both 1080i and 720p exports because its "in" each interlaced frame. (I'm not sure how an export to 540p escapes the crap.)

If you IMPORT video from MPEGStreamclip, it will not have a CA tag and CA will not have been used. It should look fine as long as it is not mixed with newly capture video.

David's correct as 24p is seen by iM as 60i. That's why he and I like 30p. The look of 24p but without any editing problems.

PS: actually i prefer the look of 720p60, but I don't own such a camcorder.

sanjeevdas wrote:
I haven't tried the 24p option. Do you still get jaggies when recording @24p?

It's unlikely to be a simple yes/no answer - here's why.

When I use QuickTime Player to play back 1080p24 footage captured by a U.S. model Canon Vixia HF11 via AIC files ingested by iMovie '08, I see all sorts of interlace artefacts. Essentially I'm watching 60i video which hasn't had inverse telecine applied to produce true 24p playback. Deinterlacing isn't the right operation for such footage. I see the same effect in VLC if I play the camera's raw MTS file directly, so this is down to the way that this particular camcorder records footage in 1080p24 mode.

Thus - I suspect that for +this camcorder+ 24p video would suffer from similar artefacts in iMovie '09 to 60i video, because both are using (a form of) interlace. 30p should be OK. The motion judder in 24p is IMHO absolutely intolerable anyway, so personally I'm never going to use that particular recording mode... But if you want it for some reason, you may need to run the footage through the Inverse Telecine project in DES Deinterlacer to get 'true' 24p footage out, which iMovie can then process correctly (FSVO "correctly", in view of the comments in this thread!). If you were to use the raw footage in iMovie and process everything as if you had 1080i60 material, render a 1080i60 movie then try to convert this wholesale to 1080p24 via inverse telecine, you may see problems with animated titles or transitions since they wouldn't be rendered with the correct field order in mind (but may be rendered progressively so might actually survive - I've not tried it).

Steve Mullen wrote:
PS: actually i prefer the look of 720p60, but I don't own such a camcorder.

So do I, but my camcorder won't do it either. I shoot in 1080i60. For rowing footage, it's been really useful to convert this to 720p60 by treating each 1920x540 interlace field as a distinct frame - essentially, deinterlacing by doubling the frame rate. The rectangular pixels of 1920x540 fields are scaled into square pixels for 1280x720 frames. Yes, some vertical resolution is of course lost compared to genuine 720p60 capture, but it's not that bad in practice.

By rendering H.264 MP4 movies, 720p60 output is obtained. I'm unable to persuade MOV files to carry 60fps; they always end up at 30fps regardless, although they may report a 60fps play rate by simply repeating each frame twice (sigh). The true 720p60 MP4 files can be played on a Playstation 3 among other devices, with single frame stepping showing really nice temporal (time) resolution with smooth / fluid normal playback. Took a lot of effort to find the right encoding steps, but well worth it.

If you want to know the tiptoe-around-a-zillion-QuickTime-bugs export settings to achieve this, reply to this post and I'll write up a page detailing the process.

David Wellerstein wrote:
The only question is, is this the right way to capture video going forward? Is Apple going to "fix" the 24p/60i issue?

I reckon you should always try to archive the closest thing to the raw captured footage that you can, so that you can reprocess things in future.

With this in mind, the "right" way to capture video depends on whether you want smooth motion - use 1080i60 - or juddering motion, but higher vertical resolution and easier processing (bugs or no bugs, progressive video is easier to handle) - use 1080p30. In turn, that will depend on the kind of thing you're filming. For example - landscapes, or architecture, or similar? 1080p30. Sports, or pop video style high energy footage with lots of pans, zooms etc.? 1080i60.

A huge generalisation, but you get the idea 🙂

Someone contributed this months ago:

I finally managed to output a movie from iMovie'08 at 60fps.
Here's how I did.

And for everyone, I strongly suggest to:
-backup your iMovie'08 projects (just duplicate the iMovie projects folder)
-backup your iMovie'08 preference file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iMovie7.plist (Duplicating it should be enough - ~/ represents your user folder)

This tip uses the power of Mac OS's XML preference files. So you will need Apple's property list editor, which is available for free with Leopard developer tools (on the Leopard DVD I guess, or on Apple's Developer site). You can also use the excellent shareware PlistEditPro, which just produces an annoying dialog until you have licensed it, available here http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22659

Quit iMovie.
Open iMovie'08's preference file with Property List Editor or PlistEdit Pro, search for "videoFrameRate". With property List Editor, you will have to clic the "Root" triangle and scroll to the end of the list.
Just change the value from 30 to 60, save and quit.

Relaunch iMovie'08.
You will notice that iMovie is less reponsive than usual : it seems the Mac now tries to calculate 60 frames instead of 30 per second.

Export your movie with Quicktime, export to MPEG-4, MP4 file format, H.2641280*720, 18000kbps, automatic keyframes, 59.94fps, main profile, single pass for video, and for audio AAC stereo 48kHz 128kbps or more.

And you get a beautiful 1280*720p60 .mp4 out of iMovie.
It plays perfectly on my MBP and on my PS3, looks much better than the 30fps version (more fluis, but it looks just as if the resolution was better, on my Mac or on my full HD TV).

I paused the movie in Quicktime Player and used the arrows: there are 60 different frames per second!!!

I recommend only using this for exporting, and then going back to the 30fps setting for iMovie : editing will be smoother .... and no collateral damage is to be expected.

Steve Mullen wrote:
Someone contributed this months ago ...

Unfortunately, as with so many other methods I read about in various places, this just results in me getting a 60fps video which actually consists of 30 frames in a second, but each frame shown twice. Perhaps the '60' setting needs to be made before the 1080i60 footage is ingested by iMovie from the camcorder or something.

My method is more involved - you use external programs to do conversion work - but doesn't need preference files editing and more to the point, works for my particular combination of software and hardware. Apparently, YMMV!

You need to convert 1080i60 to 720p60 before importing into iM.

Now iM has 60fps video.

The patch simply allows iM to export all 60 frames with the timebase set to 59.94 to codec. No special export tricks needed.

Also works with video shot at 720p60.

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PS 1: Interesting confirmation of a change to IM09 for imported video. Winston, did you mean to say "1888 x 1062, whereas previously it was 1920 x 1080."

"If I import 1080i from my camera, as you know it's encoded as AIC. Now the first thing that has happened since installing im09 (or possibly the recent QT upgrade) is that QT now reports my AIC files as having a normal size of 1888 x 1062, whereas previously it was 1440 x 1080."

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PS 2: To work with 720p DVCPRO HD you can put the HDV 720p30 clip anywhere in a Project.

You can make it be black and few seconds long. Place it as the first or last clip.

Export to DVDPRO-HD (plays smoothly in QT Player), AIC, or ProRes 422.

Movie can be imported into Toast for BD or iDVD for DVD. (Need to filter during export for DVD.)

PS 1: Interesting confirmation of a change to IM09 for imported video. Winston, did you mean to say "1888 x 1062, whereas previously it was 1920 x 1080."

Yes I did, it's the actual size of my source that's 1440. Sorry.

So yes, looks like 1080 30p, full HD import and 1920x1080 export will work fine for me. 30p is a nice compromise for a shooting look. And moving it to iTunes down to 960x540 looks great on my Apple TV connected to a 1080i plasma TV. This will do just fine for my workflow.

BTW, went over to the Apple Store and had a nice demo of FCE. Way overkill for me and it really doesn't offer any of the nice clip management that iMovie has. It would be nice if Apple did more with FCE/iMovie like Aperture/iPhoto. Maybe the nature of NLEs and video makes that impractical but I'd love to see the "pro" apps and the consumer apps play more nicely together. It's better than any alternatives I've seen in the win world though.

Again, many thanks for all the comments, for my benefit and others. I will go re-read this thread many times and I'm sure I'll pick up more all the time. I am excited to start shooting with my new toy (Canon HG21 btw).

Finally, I'm sure there's another thread/site for this but I'm interested in learning about playing back AVCHD content on a Blu-ray player using standard DVDs. Anyone know if I can do that with iMovie and (I assume) Toast 10 Titanium?

--David

David, quick question....Are you using the share>Quicktime export? If so, what settings are you using in each section (best for quality? etc.) I have a Canon HV30 camcorder shooting in 30P as well and from a test between IMHD6 and IM09 exporting via quicktime I am getting good results. I just want to make sure now that I am close to a good workflow I am exporting the best possible way.

Thanks!