HDV to DVD-Change Field Dominance Or Not?

A search I did recently pointed to this article:
[http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/bkhdvconvert.html]
The author claims that when exporting an HDV sequence from FCP to Compressor, he changed the default field dominance from Upper to Lower, resulting in a better quality DVD, smoother motion, etc.
There wasn't anything wrong with my HDV exports using the default upper dominance, but I decided to try it, just looking to squeeze out any improvement I could.
The results were terrible; awfully jerky motion, dot crawl across the top of the image, etc., so I went back to using the default.
But then I thought, I wonder if the improvement the author saw was because he exported an HDV Quicktime Movie first, then put that into Compressor and switched the field dominance . . .
I usually export my HDV timeline right out of FCP to best quality DVD in Compressor, without the in between step. Just wondering if anyone else has tried it the way it's mentioned in the article, and if it's made a difference for them.

Wow, this thread was way back there;
Anyway, I use a Sony V1U, and shoot 1080i60, and I had been getting acceptable results, but was just looking for a bit more detail.
After reading the article, I sent a finished project to Compressor both ways; 1st with the default upper field dominance, and then again changing it to lower, as the article recommended. The default upper file looked pretty good, but the 2nd time with it on lower looked terrible; all kinds of motion displacement.
I've been using the default since, and have not tried it the other way since that first time. When I get time, I'd like to try exporting a QuickTime movie first, then put that into Compressor with the switched lower dominance to see if there's any improvement that way. I usually just export directly to Compressor from the timeline.
I appreciate the comments, and I'm always interested in any setting changes that might squeeze out some more detail when going from HDV to DVD.

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HDV to DVD interlace field order - depends on export path!

Summary: Export... -> Using Compressor versus compressing an Export... -> QuickTime Movie file, produces different field orders in the resulting MPEG.
In Detail: Here is my HDV to DVD (MPEG2) process;
Create a DV sequence, and drop the HDV into it, it gets resized, and has a filter to shift the fields by +1 added to it, and is scaled to the correct size for 4:3 (letterboxed) or 16:9 (fills 720x480) - which is fine.
Set the Quicktime Video Compressor for the sequence to 'None', and set the Video Processing -> Motion Filtering Quality to 'Fastest (linear)' as I don't like what Normal or Best does to the image (makes it pixally, check in the canvas).
Now, if you Export -> Using Compressor, and setup a 2-pass mpeg 2 encode, you get a very good image, no via - DV artifacts. I also add the channel blur, set to 1 on all channels, if its too sharp - channel blur does not blur between fields, like flicker filter does, so the motion is not compromised, and looks excellent, but it stops sharp still images from flickering.
However, this is really slow, FCP is tied up, and for a 2 pass encode, any blur or colour filters get applied twice, its also harder to hand this off to a second machine to get on with.
So, logically, you would instead, Export... -> QuickTime Movie... -> Current Setting, Make Self Contained and then load that into Compressor, apply the SAME settings you did Using Compressor... At which point, the FUN begins.
I have finally narrowed down, that this changes the field order, although I nearly went mad discovering it - every time I thought my little 10 second test worked, (exported from the timeline) I would save the whole thing out and compress it, only to find, the interlace order changed, and now needed the field shift removed! And, because my little test worked, I would then do the whole thing, some 20+ hours later, only to find it was wrong!
Export... -> Using QuickTime Conversion... is the same as QuickTime Movie...
Anyone else with experience of this ? It was maddening! But I think I am over the worst of it now! Is there any solution for unifying this for all export methods ?
When it works DVD's encoded from HDV look amazing.
When it works.....
FCP 5.0.4
Compressor 2.0.1
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hi Ben,
Ignore the Apple-0 (zero) part - that's just the key shortcut for the sequence settings. (press the Apple Key, and a Zero key with a sequence selected)
So, from the top: (although I'm not in front of my machine right now, so this is from memory)
Create a new DV sequence, 4:3 or 16:9.
Drop the edited HDV sequence into the DV sequence.
De-select the HDV sequence in the DV time line, bring up the Sequence Settings Dialogue for the DV sequence. (make SURE it isn't the sequence setting dialogue for the HDV sequence)
In the sequence setting dialogue, change the codec from DV to None (note - not the same as Uncompressed). If it's currently HDV, you have the wrong sequence, leave it as HDV, close the dialogue, and bring up the setting for the DV sequence.
On the 'Video Processing' tab, for the DV sequence, set the 'Motion Filtering Quality' to 'Fastest (linear)'
Choose OK to close the settings dialogue.
If you want to, and it depends on your footage, add the following blur filter to the HDV sequence in the DV timeline:
Select the HDV sequence in the DV timeline, right click (or hold ctrl key, and click) on the HDV sequence in the DV timeline, and choose the top item in the pop-up menu, 'Open' (in viewer). Click the filters tab of the viewer, you will see the Shift Fields filter, set to +1, added by FCP, add the channel blur, above the shift fields filter. Set the blur to 1 on each channel. I prefer this to the Video -> Flicker Filter, as channel blur does not blur between fields, so it does not blur motion.
I discovered this by accident
Now Save, the following sometimes crashes FCP. Check it in the Canvas viewer, set to 100%, with the channel blur, around text and sharp contrast areas, you get a nice soft blur, turn off that filter if you think its too much.
On to the encoding:
The simplest step, is to choose the DV timeline, and export via compressor. Pick a 2 pass MPEG preset, that matches the 4:3 or 16:9 of the sequence, and submit. This takes a while, on slower machines.
The alternative, which can reduce the time, is to export the DV sequence as an uncompressed QuickTime file - this does not change the quality at all - but can speed things up, because FCP is quite slow at delivering frames to Compressor, compared to Compresser just reading the frame from an uncompressed file, Compresser has to read them twice for 2 pass MPEG encoding. However, you need a lot of fast disk space to store the uncompressed footage.
Hope this helps.
Keep the replies / mail on these boards, that way they stay useful to all!
It was great weekend in Vancouver, wasn't it ?
Hit the beach on Sunday, good times

Offline To Online Changes Field Dominance Settings?

Hi - I have an offline DV PAL sequence that I am taking online to 10-Bit Uncompressed PAL.
To my understanding PAL is Upper field dominance, and all my sequences and source files in the offline DV project are upper. However when I check the Uncompressed online project, many of the files (subclips especially) are set to Lower.
My question is this - since it's easy to change fd for clips by just right clicking in the browser, if I just set the incorrect clips' Field Dominance to Upper and make sure the shift fields filter is not enabled, can I be certain there will be no field dominance issues?
Maybe more importantly - what is the best way to determine if you have any field dominance issues? Is simply watching it on a monitor/television going to be obvious if something is wrong? Any way to check on the computer?
Thanks everybody,
Jason
G5 Quad 2.5Ghz, 30" Cinema HD Display, Final Cut Studio, CS2 Suite Mac OS X (10.4.9) Powerbooks, other Powermacs, iBooks, iMacs, etc...

Field dominance depends on the format, not the standard (pal,ntsc).
DV is lower field dominant be it PAL or NTSC, and uncompressed is upper field dominant.
For true monitoring, you'll need to view your image through an external broadcast monitor... a CRT television should be suitable for monitoring field issues (i believe... i'm sure i'll be corrected if that's wrong).
The only obvious thing to look for is 'combing'... the lines (fields) that appear around the edges of a subject on the screen, especially when there is a lot of on-screen movement.
Just out of curiosity... why are you taking a DV sequence into 10-bit uncompressed? Doing graphics etc?
J

Field dominance

Hi,
I recorded some HDV footage. It was recorded as 1080i50 with 25p.
Googling around, I found that it means its scanning the same frame twice. So there isn't a motion change between the odd and even lines.
Now the clips were captured as AIC with field dominance none. The sequence preset I used for HDV AIC is with field dominance Upper.
Is it correct that it does not make a difference whether I have field dominance set to None or Upper? None would obviously be correct as that is what the clip is set to but it should not matter, right?
thanks

I thought the field dom is simply telling which field to scan and display first (and even with none, if burning to DVD and viewing on a television, the footage will be displayed as interlaced).
Also the effect is added to clips which have field dom: none so shouldn't it be applied uniformly to the clip?
I'm a little confused.
The only effect I have added so far is smoothcam. Other than that, I have been sending to Color for grading.

Working out Field dominance

I've got a sequence I'm working on where the field dominance is causing me trouble.
Essentially I've got a wide view, shot on an SD/DV camera and this is intercut with footage from a HiDef/AVCHD camera. The finished output is a DVD via iDVD and looks mostly OK (although the HiDef originated footage is far superior) but some chunks/chapters have strange double-vision/lack of smoothness which I assume is incorrect field ordering. Removing all "Shift Fields" filters seemed to help a bit, implying that the automatic calculations were getting it wrong, but I still have some bits that need tweaking.
What I'd really like to know is - is there a way of determining what the setting should be without going through the (extremely time-consuming) process of creating a DVD and looking at it on a telly?
Also, I'm not sure about the difference between +1/none/-1 (I can't believe that there can be three possible options!)
Thanks!
By the way, I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, but to get the best quality DVD from my HiDef AVCHD footage (Panasonic SD1), I find it's best to have the sequence at DV resolution (eg. by dragging some old DV clip onto it, allowing the "change to match clip" request and then removing the clip) before dragging the HiDef clips onto the timeline. I presume that what I'm doing is getting FCE to do the down-scaling rather than leaving it to iDVD - that does a somewhat poorer job.

I must correct myself: step 2. in my previous explanation is not done by FCE, which leaves the field dominance of the clip unchanged in the sequence. In fact this step is not necessary since the field dominance of the containing sequence is used during playback and export by FCE, independent of the clips dominance.
As a result also "fixing" the clip dominance, as I suggested, is not needed.
Instead adding the Shift Field filter is mandatory (and usually automatic) whenever the clip and sequence field dominance do not match.
Piero
(Alexander I agree with you: even if the section of the manual I referred is in my opinion clear, there are other sections in the same manual that are confusing: e.g. IV-388 makes statements about field dominance that seem not correct to me, mixing up the time sequence of fields and the field dominance...)

Why Would Upper Field Dominance Change The Quality Of My SD So Much?

I did a shoot in SD and edited it as such of course. The thing is when I was done, all of my slow motion looked echoy (a plague of mine if you're not familiar with my posts) and generally looked a bit lower quality then even SD usually gives. So I freaked out (finally) and found a guy on line that suggested changing the field dominance to Upper and to make sure that I have my Video Processing set to "Fastest Linear". Now this was a guy that has had this posted for a couple of years, so it wasn't like he actually told me this directly.
Well, it worked. The video looks good, slow motion is nice and smooth. Just for fun, plus the fact that I don't have a clue what I'm doing, I decided to see what it would look like leaving the processing the to Fastest and change the dominance to lower, and behold, the cruddy video plague of mine returned. It seems like everywhere else I look, people say not to do this, but it worked. Why? I do know what the dominance of upper and lower are, I'm just not smart enough to know why it worked and I want to learn this badly. For example, would I do this same dominance for HD?
Thanks again guys,
Crayton

I filmed it in SD on my Sony HDV-AU1 camera. What is killing me is if I choose upper then the footage looks fine, but then what I have done is add some jpeg images that I created in photoshop on a PC. they are simple images of text that say "Round 1" or "Round 2" in between the fights. I have them spin into view using one of the transitions in FCP, but when I get it to dvd, they look horrible, echoy, just like the footage looked like before I changed it to upper field. So as it looks now, I can't have both look good i guess. This doesn't make sense to me!! It is incredibly frustrating especially since I'm out of money and almost out of time on this project (it has to be done by next week). I keep re-doing the project, re-building it, re-setting it in one type of sequence after another and it's not looking good at all. what am I doing wrong?

Workaround for compressor HDV to DVD field issue?

I need a work around for the field issue apparent when down-converting HDV to DVD.
The Bonsai method <http://www3.telus.net/bonsai/Welcome.html> will not work, as there is too much motion and a side effect of the "fastest" conversion is that it gives a 3-d ghosting effect on fast motion in the frame.
I can not convert to 720P60 or 480P, as FCP converts it to 30P and then doubles the frames, and the motion is jittery.
I could dump it to camera and then down-convert in camera, but I have heard this is not a great method either.
I have seen in another forum to save the HDV timeline in FCP as a HDV quicktime movie, and then import that into DVD studio pro and have it down-convert, but DVD studio pro says this is an "incompatible file".
How do I get 1080i HDV footage onto a DVD so that it looks acceptable?

I had a similar problem with HDV (1080i shot on Cannon HV-20) footage, looks great in post and terrible when converted (herringbone lines and too many artifacts.) I’ve successfully used the Bonsai method on another piece I did but the footage was shot on a HVX-200 at 720 24p and there were no “action” shots. I wasn’t as successful using the method using 1080i footage and it definitely didn’t help with the fast motion shots. I did a search in this forum on HD to SD and there are a lot of helpful hints and methods. I experimented with a lot of the suggestions but in the end I was able to produce very nice and acceptable results by doing the following:
1] I didn’t create an SD sequence; I exported the footage as a Quicktime movie (self contained) straight from my HDV sequence.
2] I dropped the Quicktime file into Compressor and selected 90-minute DVD Anamorphic Best 2-pass VBR. Running Compressor from Final Cut ties up your system as well as there seems to be a delay between the handoff from Final Cut to Compressor (running the latest 5.x version and 2.3.) Creating a Quicktime file frees your system and it’s debatable if you actually compress faster or take a hit on quality. I’ve tested both from Final Cut and using a Quicktime file and didn't see any real difference in quality.
3] Change the field dominance from Top to Progressive in the tab where you see 2-Pass VBR Best and also in the encoding tab (not in front of my system so I can’t recall the name or order of the icons). In the encoding tab you will notice it says “same as source.” The pull down will show you Top, Bottom, Progressive, Automatic…I tried them all and in various combinations and anything other than progressive in both tabs produced undesirable results.
4] The options for Fast, Good, Better and Best in the other encoding pull down sections are a matter of preference and patience. Selecting Best in all categories takes a really long time to compress (36 hours for a 9-minute piece using a Mac Pro 3.0GHz dual-core Intel with 4GB ram.) I ran tests using different combinations and found that selecting the default settings is decent and stepping each category up to the next level helped but not enough to warrant the long compression cycle to stick with Better across the board. When you do your testing, it’s best to use as little footage as possible or you will find yourself waiting too long to see the actual results. I used a 1-second (29 frames) shot of a girl twirling around, hair flying everywhere, and girls next to her using hula-hoop’s.
5] Use the sliding bar in the viewer to see the impact of your choices before submitting the job. To the right you will see the “original” footage and to the left you can see the results of your selection. You can move the bar across the footage to see (approximately) the end results.
6] One thing I did notice is that no matter what settings I use, the output is slightly darker (reds were deeper, skin tones were warmer and not as smooth), but hey, you are going from HDV to SD so it’s not going to be perfect.
Hope that helps and good luck.
Kenny

HDV to DVD field issue

I need a work around for the field issue apparent when down-converting HDV to DVD.
The Bonsai method will not work, as there is too much motion and a side effect of the "fastest" conversion is that it gives a 3-d ghosting effect on fast motion in the frame.
I can not convert to 720P60 or 480P, as FCP converts it to 30P and then doubles the frames, and the motion is jittery.
I could dump it to camera and then down-convert in camera, but I have heard this is not a great method either.
I have seen in another forum to save the HDV timeline in FCP as a HDV quicktime movie, and then import that into DVD studio pro and have it down-convert, but DVD studio pro says this is an "incompatible file".
How do I get 1080i HDV footage onto a DVD so that it looks acceptable?

Just to make sure I undestand you (I am having the same problem...my video looks jagged and not very sharp).
You're saying to creat a new sequence that is the 720 x 480 10 Bit Uncompressed?
And then in Settings under field dominance set that to NONE and motion filtering quality to Best. When I put my sequence into this uncompressed timeline, do I need to render it or can I just go straight to compressor? Does it matter?
Are there any settings within Compressor to change, such as Deinterlacing, field dominance (progressive, lower/even, upper/odd), blur, anti-aliasing?
I am using HDV 1080i60 Codec to shoot in and edit.
Thanks so much. I will try your suggestion. Have you used this procedure much?

Ignore or not to ignore field dominance in inspector?

Created DVSD and 8bit movies in FC lower field dominant,(this of course can be checked by clip or movie properties,) however when brought into Compressor, inspector often gets it wrong. Changing native field dominance back to lower in inspector causes jumps in cuts down stream (as MPEG video on DVD.) Is inspector blowin smoke or just causing fires? What's the real story? Why would FC movie properties show lower field and Comp inspector show upper?
Thanks for any insight!

Can have many possible errors.
- wrong field grabbing (happend on early panasonic SD Progressive Cameras)
- wrong field setting in FCP
- wrong field setting when exporting
- wrong field setting when compressing
The only way you can be sure is to check your final product on a crt TV.
Most Softwareplayer will compensate the errors.
If you have a "field shift" meaning that on files is carried over half a frame to the next frame, then it is most likely that something with the import went wrong. This mostly happens if you transfer material from some kind of player via Firewire to DV and then capture it in FCP.
First thing try setting the Clip properties of the imported clips in FCP and use the default settings in the timeline.
Message was edited by: vex3d

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Thanks
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HDV to DVD-Change Field Dominance Or Not?

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