Check your field settings

[incubate]

I have noticed that SE doesn't correctly interpret footage rendered out from AE. All of my progressive renders out of AE brought back into SE are seen as interlaced by the auto field setting. Simply by clicking the progressive tab my crisp clean footage is revealed. I mention this because often I read that people are struggling with footage quality issues and the cure is probably just a click away. Also another good tip to keep in mind when editing for final delivery to desk top play back is to convert any interlace footage to progressive, in doing so you will get rid of those pesky and irritating interlace lines.

Hope this is of help to some.

[bbeanan]

ahh but if your footage is interlaced to begin with it will soften the image a bit...

[lcress]

ahh but if your footage is interlaced to begin with it will soften the image a bit...

I have found that to be the case, as well. I have been keeping my video as interlaced even when going to DVD because I thought progressive looked too soft.

Are we missing some extra step besides just converting to progressive? Is there some magic voodoo dance to keep the sharpness of interlace in progressive scan?

[incubate]

I'm a lover of After Effects, where I generally do all my finishing and grading. Use the stock standard sharpen filter in AE or get a plug in called Topaz Enhance, a little pricey but the results are outstanding, also great for fixing dodgy footage. As a rule of thumb progressive is always a little soft, sometimes tweaking the contrast can sharpen it.

[lcress]

Use the stock standard sharpen filter in AE or get a plug in called Topaz Enhance, a little pricey but the results are outstanding

Good tip. A quick lookup on the web says about $350. Not out of the question if you can budget that into your project. Let the client pay for it.

Is there a demo? I'd hate to promise "sure I can fix your crummy footage" and not be able to deliver.

Also, this sounds great for short 30 second spot work but what about long format DVD work?. How fast is it?

[KiloWatkins]

Are we missing some extra step besides just converting to progressive? Is there some magic voodoo dance to keep the sharpness of interlace in progressive scan?

There are some nice settings is SE mpeg codec settings, simular to TMPG. I have seen much in just setting the 10bit flag, but in TMPG, and quality/noise settings. Of course with Noise, that can be 30+ hours, to clean up 2 hours.

GoodLuck

[incubate]

Topaz does have a full usage 1 month trial, crikey I'm starting to sound like one of their agents... I'm not!