blinking problem with exported video

dijego · Post by **dijego** » Sat Oct 06, 2007 1:59 am

ken, when you say problems with frame-based video played on normal tv, what exactly do u mean? is this possibility or certainty?
i will try to burn dvd tomorrow and see how it plays on dvd player with standard home tv

further, is it possible that my field order is messed because i have a pair of little movie clips made by mobile phone and digital camera, and the rest of project (90%) is just movie clips that i made from slideshow of pictures, so they must be low field. For what i read upper field is in analog footage while lower in digital, so i dont have idea what happened with my field order.

and one more question - if i have to output project to other format as a last resort, what is the best option so it can be safely viewed on every average home computer? or is there another idea to output it so it can be viewed on tv?

thanx

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Sat Oct 06, 2007 3:03 am

dijego... here is a link to a list of tutorials that you will find interesting. If you scroll down to: Digital Video Basics & Video Compression Video Tutorials

You'll find a list tutorials that explains simply the various ins & outs of digital video.

Link:

http://takeoneflix.com/tutorial-index/

It helped me a lot!

dijego · Post by **dijego** » Sat Oct 06, 2007 3:18 am

thanx clevo, i ll read that

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sat Oct 06, 2007 3:36 am

EDIT: Clevo beat me to the punch as I was composing the following. However, I will leave it as it is, though with apologies for over-simplifications in case you do in fact read the tutorials!!

As you are beginning to understand through sheer (bad) experience, Field Order is a complicated subject. First, there is no hard and fast rule such as you expressed that digital video is Lower Field First (LFF) and analogue is Upper Field First (UFF). Digital video from a mini DV camera is LFF, yes, but if you have connected an analogue source like a an analogue video camera or VCR to the mini DV camera to transfer analogue video through the mini DV camera acting as a pass-through device via Firewire to the computer, the resulting captured video, which started life as analogue, will also be LFF.

Most analogue capture devices apart from this tend to use UFF, yes. But digital mini DVD and hard disc video cameras also tend to use UFF.

Both LFF and UFF are what are termed interlaced. That is because the filming and broadcast system used transmits one full image in two parts. As you know, a standard television signal sends images in lines, but does this by first transmitting lines 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 etc, and then lines 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and so on (or vice versa), but doing so very quickly so that the naked eye perceives the end result as a solid image i.e. your eye 'interlaces' the two parts of the image into one. An image which is Upper Field First is one which transmits lines 1, 3, 5 etc first, then the even lines second. Lower Field First does the reverse -- even lines first, then odd.

In video editing terms if you have video clips which use one Field Order, but process them so that they use the wrong field order, it means that the lines making up the image are being sent in the wrong order. The end result is that the naked eye still interlaces them, but perceives them as being jerky or flickery because the lines are being projected out of order. So that is the importance of getting Field Order correct for interlaced video.

Then we have frame based. A still image is a still image, that is to say, a solid frame. It is filmed as a complete whole, rather than as a series of alternating lines which have to be transmitted in the correct order in order for the eye to be able to see them correctly. Hence, Frame Based and the fact that in video editing terms, a slideshow of still images can be processed as Frame Based because each frame transmitted is already complete. But you can also process a slideshow as either LFF or UFF, because each series of lines is still going to make up that solid image regardless of the order in which they are transmitted.

But just to complicate things, along comes modern TV technology, and now with digital and HD TVs we have what is termed 'progressive scan' which in a sense is analogous to frame based, though in this case it applies to moving video images. But each frame is transmitted as a single solid image. No interlacing involved. That's perhaps the main reason why a digital and HD TV image appears to be so much better quality: cleaner and crisper.

Now, a progressive scan digital or HD TV comes with a decoder which can display interlaced video correctly. However, the older, standard TVs don't come with any fancy decoder like that, and can only broadcast in interlaced mode. And to repeat, if you get the Field Order used in the interlacing wrong, then the image broadcast will be broadcast as jerky or flickery.

A slideshow is the exception. It can be burned to a DVD as Frame Based and still be viewed on a standard TV correctly. But video which started life as either LFF or UFF but which is converted to Frame Based will not display correctly on a standard TV because in essence each frame broadcast is only half the picture, both literally and figuratively (and if you will pardon the pun). A computer monitor will display it correctly because it uses different technology to a standard TV.

dijego · Post by **dijego** » Sat Oct 06, 2007 4:34 am

Thanks Ken for your thorought explanation. Yes i watched couple of tutorials but nevermind the explanation you gave was great add, like something chewed and said so it can be understand with ease

Well, look at me, i just wanted to make some nice video from travels of me and my friends and now im in field orders progressive scan and so on.. ;]
Maybe i could say if i only knew it before and not after i already did my project. But, who knows, maybe if i knew all that, i wouldn done the project with same inspiration that i had while working on it.
Because, while working in Video Studio 11, i was expressing myself. I didnt think about anything else, especially not field orders. And VS was really opened for me because what i was feeling like to do it let me do in a user friendly way. You know, i spotted a clip i could use so i put it, i made a slideshow of pictures and put it, i interviewed my friend with mobile camera and put that..
Now, i cant imagine doing this project all over again. Because everything i did was my expression. And i cant not express myself twice the same.
So, the conclusion is that i will have to make the best use of what i have. I ll try to make DVD video and i ll also always have the option to make data DVD so it can be viewed on PC the way and in quality i imagined.

Sorry for a off topic

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Sat Oct 06, 2007 6:47 am

dijego wrote:Thanks Ken for your thorought explanation. Yes i watched couple of tutorials but nevermind the explanation you gave was great add, like something chewed and said so it can be understand with ease

Well, look at me, i just wanted to make some nice video from travels of me and my friends and now im in field orders progressive scan and so on.. ;]
Maybe i could say if i only knew it before and not after i already did my project. But, who knows, maybe if i knew all that, i wouldn done the project with same inspiration that i had while working on it.
Because, while working in Video Studio 11, i was expressing myself. I didnt think about anything else, especially not field orders. And VS was really opened for me because what i was feeling like to do it let me do in a user friendly way. You know, i spotted a clip i could use so i put it, i made a slideshow of pictures and put it, i interviewed my friend with mobile camera and put that..
Now, i cant imagine doing this project all over again. Because everything i did was my expression. And i cant not express myself twice the same.
So, the conclusion is that i will have to make the best use of what i have. I ll try to make DVD video and i ll also always have the option to make data DVD so it can be viewed on PC the way and in quality i imagined.

Sorry for a off topic

No it's spot ON topic and it's something that perhaps in future program designers can and should take into account. If I saw something funny on youtube and wanted to add it in a project a good program should ask me if I want to render it with warnings about resolution loss etc etc.

On a recent project for my Mother in Law's 60th birthday I created a slide show and I did a lot of experimenting with project settings so that I can get the best result possible for something i spent a lot of time creating. I did a lot of reading and at the end I accomplished a very nice gift that looked good on my CRT TV (4:3) and looked brilliant on my MIL's plasma16:9 TV (except the reds washed out more). The project looked amazing on the PC. I was very impressed withmyself and VS11+

I learnt that with limited hardware it will be impossible to accomodate all possible monitors.

Accepting that and what I know now the creative muse I experience while making the project came back stronger and I am wiser. So much so, i can;t wait till my next project. As I learnt soooo much on the last one.

Each learning battle makes you better. Keep at it. I can no do more with VS11 because I'm becoming creatively better.

instantlegend · Post by **instantlegend** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 6:49 pm

Ken

Thanks for all your responses on this thread. It has been helpful. I have a project that has a couple hundred still pictures and 4 short video clips. I had been rendering it LFF and always had a flicker right after each transition. I changed it to frame based and the flickering went away and it appears everything is correct. I am using DV in my project and am watching the final DVD on a standard TV and it looks good. My question is, after reading your explanation of LFF, what does this do to my video?

Thanks

Post by **Ken Berry** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 11:37 pm

Simple answer -- don't know!

But if it works, then good. But in theory, the video parts of your project could display the problems associated with changing the field order. Usually, though, to see it, the video has to have fast action and rapid panning or bold horizontal lines which will look jagged. If your clips do not have any of those, the distortion will be minimal and possibly not really noticeable to the naked eye. But hey, I'm just guessing here.

Normally if do my slideshows separately and use Frame Based for them when I convert the slideshow to video. I don't include video in them. I keep my videos separate, and being home made, from my mini DV camera, they are invariably LFF. And as I said above, there is no problem mixing Field Based video with Frame Based. It's only the two Frame Based types that can't be mixed together in the one project.

instantlegend · Post by **instantlegend** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 6:43 pm

I now have another problem related to this issue. The video I first had the problem with, which plays ok now, is causing a problem when inserted into another project. I tried exporting the video both as mpeg2 and avi and inserting it into another project which had 2 mpeg clips and an avi clip. I tried rendering this project as frame based and LFF and the inserted video that was made with Video Studio flicker worse that I have ever seen. i tried the anti-flicker option with no success. The inserted video was rendered frame-based as mentioned in an earlier post. The video plas fine by itself. I have re-rendered this about 12 times now trying everything that I could think of and nothing worked. I finally tried combining both projects into one project file (very time consuming) and rendering the entire project together. The flickering still occured at the same place. The part that flickers is a section that has a lot of still images. I rendered the new combined project both as LFF and frame based and both has the same poor reslults. Anyone have any idea how I can fix this?