Graphics

Right - so as mentioned in another thread, I have a 1080p 60fps project I am in the process of converting over to 1080i 29.97, and I have encountered a small problem.

This particular batch of scenes uses a rendered video clip as a texture. Previously this clip was at the 1080p60 spec, so I went back into AE and re-rendered it with the XPression 7 codec at 1080i 29.97, and although the clip lines up perfectly timing wise, the interlace is terrible and the end frame resolves to ghosted sort of image with only half the fields being displayed. It seems that I could get it looking right if I rendered it at 1080p 29.97, but would that screw things up down the pipe, or does XPression handle the field split of progressive clips on its own?

Cheers
- Willie

My guess is that when rendering it from AE directly to the XPression codec, AE doesn't mark the AVI file as interlaced. If you assign the video clip to a video material and look at the properties in the material does it show say "Interlaced: N" or "Interlaced: Y"? My guess is the video properties will show the clip is not interlaced; but it is actually rendered as fields, so you will get bad interlacing when freezing the clip.

I would use the XPression Video Coder to do the conversion to XPression codec and make sure to choose 29.97 "Upper Field First". Then check the material properties for this clip and it certainly should show as "Interlaced" in the properties.

You could also just render as 29.97p and there should be no issue other than you will only have half the temporal resolution but this is usually not noticeable and honestly is what I see almost everyone doing anyway.


#XPression

I think in the video material settings you can also force the video to be interpreted as "Upper Field First". So even if AE writes the properties as progressive (though the video actually contains fields); you can override the material settings so XPression will treat it as having discrete fields.
#XPression

Thanks - Yeah, I noticed when I was swapping the interlaced clip for the progressive one that the info panel stated interlaced N, even if i put upper field in the drop down, so your suspicion seems spot on. I've not used the XPression encoder before since AE has the codec, but I'd prefer to do it the right way, so i will round trip my clips through there
#XPression

Well... blast. The resulting video coming out of XPression Encoder takes a real hit in quality, the results look heavily aliased, even with the encoder settings at 100. I guess I will have to go with 29.97p and hope for the best...
#XPression

Did you try changing the field mode on the video shader of the material? That should fix it without doing any re-rendering.
#XPression

https://i.imgur.com/aoR2sWb.png
#XPression