Analogue/Digital in same project.

[roy wood]

The capture advice is always Analogue/upper field Digital/lower field.

Then what should the Project Setting be if both are used in the same Project? Since one or the other will be changed taking longer to render why not capture both the same or am I missing something here? Please.

[Ken Berry]

While others may have different opinions, I believe the simple answer is that you should not be mixing the two, period! If you render a file which started life using Upper Field First in a project which uses Lower Field First, that file will inevitably look awful if it involves panning or rapid movement. And the vice versa also applies.

The only way around it is to use your video with one Field Order as a separate project, and render it out to a DVD-compatible mpeg-2 using that Field Order. And once you have all your various mpeg-2s (using the two Field Orders separately), you should then be able to burn them to disc as separate titles. But mixing Field Orders *within* a single project is AFAIK a no-no!

[sjj1805]

There have been a couple of times where I have mixed analogue and digital. As an example last year I went to San Francisco and shot quite a bit of video with my digital camcorder.

Despite my best efforts I couldn't get the shot I wanted to emphasise the famous bumpy roads so I thought I would cheat a little and extract a minutes worth of Hollywood to mix in with my own. This was recorded off the TV via my analogue Hauppauge TV card and was in fact in MPEG - My camcorder stuff was in DV.

The bulk of my video was digital (Lower Field First) and this 1 minute clip was analogue (Upper field First). I kept the whole lot in Lower field first and it turned out great. I also threw in several photographs taken with my digital camera. I had no issues with those either.

The thing to do when you have a project of this nature is to grab small samples from each source and quickly throw together a sample video to see how it turns out.

[Ken Berry]

Steve -- did the analogue sequence on bumpy roads involve any rapid movement or (rapid) panning? As you know, that is where using the wrong Field Order is usually most visible. Otherwise, if the video only had minimal and slow movement, I would agree that you often can't tell the two Field Orders apart even if one is 'wrong'...

[roy wood]

Thanks Ken & Steve that's helped a great deal. Regards Roy.

[sjj1805]

Steve -- did the analogue sequence on bumpy roads involve any rapid movement or (rapid) panning? As you know, that is where using the wrong Field Order is usually most visible. Otherwise, if the video only had minimal and slow movement, I would agree that you often can't tell the two Field Orders apart even if one is 'wrong'...

Ken,
It was a high speed car chase taken from 'The Presidio'
I've done the same sort of thing a few other times. I did several tests with field order and generally found that best results were obtained by sticking to the field order of whichever video clip came first which tends to be from the camcorder (lower field first.)

[DiscCoasterPro]

If I may toss my thoughts in. If you look up "tortured by field order" in the encyclopedia, you will surely find my photos.

Here is what IMO is the best way to go. No, check that ... here is what IMO is the only way to go, at least for a no brainer result.

Use an external DV/AVI firewire capture device to capture your analogue footage via firewire to your computer. Such devices are the Canopus 110 and 300 or the Pyro Link or your digital camcorder with pass-through. These external devices are set to capture LFF DV/AVI. Mixing these analogue captures with your digital video is a fool proof vanilla mix

Of course if you already have an mpeg capture device .. I hope you have better overall luck than I did.