I HATE the fact that interlacing and the 1000/1001 frame rates have persisted into the HD era.

Come on! That was our big chance to rid ourselves of that idiocy!

Posted by Charles Angus  on  12/01  at  08:16 PM

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I agree with you completely - HD was a chance to go to integer frame rates and all progressive scan. I’m particularly distraught that we clung into the old film production model (shoot 24, add pulldown) for HD distribution. Backward compatibility is of course important, but this was a case of fossilized practices, not best practices. Yet, here we are…

Posted by Chris Meyer  on  12/01  at  10:27 PM

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And don’t get me started on the choice of 1.78:1 as the aspect instead of 1.85:1…

Posted by Charles Angus  on  12/02  at  05:33 PM

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Also, I thought I’d mention that while the thumbnail for this article displays a progressive frame constructed by using two sequential fields (and therefore having lots of horizontal lines), the image in the article (which is similar) shows what looks like it might be line doubling to make a progressive image. The thumbnail image is much more arresting as a demonstration of bad de-interlacing, in my opinion…

Posted by Charles Angus  on  12/02  at  05:36 PM

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Aside from wanting to grab attention, I wanted to show two sides of the problem.

Worst of all is not deinterlacing interlaced material, as shown by the thumbnail (what’s really fun is to then scale this by less than 50% - the fields get really mushed).

Second-bad - and the focus the main article I was linking to, and illustrated by the main figure up top - is to separate fields, but ignore that the source actually had pulldown, which means it was indeed possible to reconstruct sharp, whole progressive frames.

To boil down my recommendations: If it has pulldown, remove the pulldown! If it’s interlaced, separate the fields, and if possible use something like FieldsKit to reconstruct the best image you can from the remaining information.

Posted by Chris Meyer  on  12/02  at  11:34 PM

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Agreed.

Thanks for the clarification.

Posted by Charles Angus  on  12/02  at  11:47 PM

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I bought some video clips off iTunes from a VERY popular UK band and when I played them back they were unwatchable because no one de-interlaced it before going from 1080i > 720p on fast motion/strobe light video. I contacted iTunes and they told me that was how it looked on their file so that was “how it was supposed to look”!

frustrating! (But nice to know I know more than the people that work on some big name music projects…)

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  12/03  at  01:20 PM

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Sometimes it’s HARD!

A couple years ago, it took me several days of tinkering to get the right tool, and the right settings to get my 1080i30 HDV down to 720p30 for a clean Vimeo feed. “Deinterlace” in one tool is not the same as another. And the _order_ of the actions is critical (don’t downsample to 720p from 1080i and THEN deinterlace!)

Now add CMOS jellocam on top of this!

Posted by IEBA  on  12/14  at  07:40 PM

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