Progressive frame rate

This is my first foray into HD, so my apology for this rudimentary question.

How can I tell if an HD footage is progressive or interlaced?

I have 30min worth of HDCAM. The post house that did the transfer told me that they're 1080p25 (I have no reason to doubt them). I'm just curious if there's any way I can double-check to make sure that they're 25p and not 25i.

I imported a sample clip into FCP and looked under 'Item Properties'. I only saw the following data but no mentioning of whether it's progressive or interlaced:

Vid Rate: 25fps
Frame Size: 1920 x 1080
Compressor: Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2
Pixel Aspect: Square
Field Dominance: Upper (Odd)

By the way, does progressive video have a field dominance?

Thanks,

td

G5 2.3GHz Dual Core, 4.5GB RAM, 2 500GB drives, Mac OS X (10.4.4), Powerbook G4 on OS 10.3.9

Posted on May 24, 2007 6:21 AM

May 27, 2007 9:18 PM in response to Michael Grenadier

After a lot of hair pulling, I think I finally got this figured out:

The negative was scanned at 25Psf. FCP probably read this as interlaced because of the 50 segmented frames, so it tagged these footages with Upper field dominance.

When the post house conformed the project in FCP, they matched the Timeline settings to the settings of the scanned footages (with Upper field dominance), resulting in a 50i frame rate.

This is why these footages look progressive when played at 100% speed despite the interlaced setting. But they look interlaced when sped up or slowed down because FCP is adding or dropping frames randomly to compensate for the speed change. It's also why when I dropped one of these footages in a timeline, they stay gray regardless of the Field dominance setting.

When I reset the timeline's Field dominance to None, the interlacing is gone in the shots with speed change.

In other words, if there's no speed change in the timeline, it doesn't matter whether the Field dominance is Upper or None. But if there's speed change, then it has to be None or you'd get interlacing.

Anyhow, I hope this information will be helpful to someone in the future if they go through this process.

td