[Eug]

Take a look at this iMovie clip at Apple. Clip!

The video is riddled with areas that can cause combing. I get the same problems with my .mpgs from my DVD-RAM cam.

Are people getting the same problems with MiniDV?

[Eug]

P.S. For those who don't know, this is combing:

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Does this happen with RAW video or after you export it?

[Uncle Skeleton]

it will be both. iMovie's primary purpose is to let people add simple effects like titles and editing before exporting back to tape, or to iDVD. Not for computer media. There's no (de)interlacing support in iMovie. If you have to use iMovie, you'll have to export to DV (which is the only QT friendly format I know of that supports interlacing) and deinterlace with a third party app like Cleaner, ffmpeg, or MediaPipe (though MP's deinterlacer is crap unless you're scaling to exactly half height). You can also open an interlaced DV or DV-codec file in QT Pro and export with the High Quality flag set (I think) to remove visible interlacing, but I'm not sure exactly how (well) this works

[Eug]

So are you're saying:

1) Edit video in iMovie
2) Export as DV
3) Run another program to deinterlace and convert to .mov
4) Then import into iDVD 3 for burning?

(You seemed to suggest that iDVD would be OK with this interlaced video, but my TV and DVD player are progressive scan so combing is painfully obvious unless I flip back into interlaced mode.)

I tried running the deinterlacer on an .mpg file in ffmpegX (or was that AfroPic?) and the results were less than impressive. Interlacing artifacts were still visible, except that now everything was smudged because of the re-encode. And I didn't even know these programs supported the .dv format.

BTW, how is video stored on a DV tape?

EDIT:

Originally posted by Disgruntled Head of C-3PO:
Does this happen with RAW video or after you export it?

I don't have any raw .dv footage if that's what you mean. Everything I have is MPEG-2 from my DVD-RAM cam.

I have to demux the video from the MPEG-2 and then convert it to .dv with QT Pro for use in iMovie. (By the way, does anyone know of a batch MPEG-2 to .dv converter? In QT Pro, I have to convert the files one at a time.)

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally posted by Eug:
...but my TV and DVD player are progressive scan so combing is painfully obvious unless I flip back into interlaced mode...

Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that. My general philosophy is to avoid as much lossy conversion as possible, so I would say if your destination format doesn't include computers, go with flipping it back (is that hard? I'm curious how this works). I think (especially if you have such hard core hardware) the only adequate deinterlacer available is Cleaner's for a cool 600 (or limewire + your soul)

[Eug]

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that. My general philosophy is to avoid as much lossy conversion as possible, so I would say if your destination format doesn't include computers, go with flipping it back (is that hard? I'm curious how this works). I think (especially if you have such hard core hardware) the only adequate deinterlacer available is Cleaner's for a cool 600 (or limewire + your soul)

Nah. Flipping it back ain't hard but the button isn't on my remote. It means having to get up off my lazy @ss and walking over to the DVD player. Press one button and it shuts off progressive scan mode. My TV responds by automatically switching to interlaced mode (line-doubled).

Actually, I can deal with that. The problem arises when I give the DVDs to friends who watch them on the computer. Combing hell... (A few of them have to view the discs on a computer because their old DVD players don't support DVD-R.)

As for cleaner, yeah, it's a bit much to be paying for home videos, and I'm thinking it would take quite a while to process the video.

[Uncle Skeleton]

I know what you're talking about. When I watch the simpsons dvd on the computer (no standalone player) it's pretty much unwatchable because of combing, unless I squint and lean waaaay back. I'm really hoping a new tool comes along soon that's faster than cleaner and better quality than mediapipe for deinterlacing

[Eug]

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
it will be both. iMovie's primary purpose is to let people add simple effects like titles and editing before exporting back to tape, or to iDVD. Not for computer media. There's no (de)interlacing support in iMovie. If you have to use iMovie, you'll have to export to DV (which is the only QT friendly format I know of that supports interlacing) and deinterlace with a third party app like Cleaner, ffmpeg, or MediaPipe (though MP's deinterlacer is crap unless you're scaling to exactly half height). You can also open an interlaced DV or DV-codec file in QT Pro and export with the High Quality flag set (I think) to remove visible interlacing, but I'm not sure exactly how (well) this works

OK I no longer have the DVD-RAM cam and bought myself a MiniDV cam.

Someone mentioned on another forum that iMovie drops every second line if you go over 320x240 but can maintain the quality if you export with the High Quality flag set.

So I've captured some MiniDV footage and done some testing.

I have tried various settings, but it seems that above 320x480, only DV works without combing. This is true whether I export thru QT directly from iMovie or if I export to DV first and then export from within QT, without iMovie. The strange part is the video seems to look OK in iDVD, at least in the iDVD preview, but I suspect I will get problems once the encoding stage occurs in iDVD.

With the highest video settings (Best Quality, 29.97 fps, no key frame, and 720x480) I get combing still. I can't find a High Quality flag anywhere in the prefs.

It looks fine at 320x240 though.

Examples are here:

iMovie Full DV export (No combing) - WTF? I can't get it to work online. Works fine on my desktop but as soon as upload it it breaks, even if it's zipped.
QT best quality video export at full rez (Combing galore) 1.7 MB
QT best quality video export at 320x240 (No combing) 0.4 MB

EDIT:

Here is the iMovie self contained movie export. (Whatever that means.) No combing but on Windows it looks like @ss. Looks fine on my Mac though.

[buddhabelly]

Originally posted by Eug:
[B]OK I no longer have the DVD-RAM cam and bought myself a MiniDV cam.

Someone mentioned on another forum that iMovie drops every second line if you go over 320x240 but can maintain the quality if you export with the High Quality flag set.

So I've captured some MiniDV footage and done some testing.

I have tried various settings, but it seems that above 320x480, only DV works without combing. This is true whether I export thru QT directly from iMovie or if I export to DV first and then export from within QT, without iMovie. The strange part is the video seems to look OK in iDVD, at least in the iDVD preview, but I suspect I will get problems once the encoding stage occurs in iDVD.

With the highest video settings (Best Quality, 29.97 fps, no key frame, and 720x480) I get combing still. I can't find a High Quality flag anywhere in the prefs.

It looks fine at 320x240 though.

I'm sure you know that comsumer video cameras are going to shoot interlaced video. So, if you want to avoid this a)use a camera that shoots in progressive scan or b)manually de-interlace the footage after it's shot.

There's a couple of ways to de-interlace. In QTPro, I believe there is a video filter to do this, however, it just drops one of the fields. If this is all you got, you can deinterlace both fields as seperate files then overlay on on top of the other at a lower opacity and get pretty better results.

I personally like the way VLC can blend the to fields to de-interlace in realtime, which is pretty much the same as what I wrote previously.

Now if you got the dough there's some other options, Magic Bullet etc., but they all do things pretty much the same, either dropping a field or blending them together.

EDIT: I've been spending too much time in FCP lately. There is no QT filter to de-interlace that I could find. Sorry for the mistake. You can however use ffmpegx, mediapipe, compressor, etc.

As for the link for captured raw footage: Are all the dependencis intact? Try to export a short clip as a self-contained movie.

[Uncle Skeleton]

well, there is a filter (as you described it). go to Movie Properties, Video Track, High Quality, and select Single Field. but obviously all that does is drop half the data

[Eug]

1) Thx. Self-contained movie worked for the upload, but for some reasons I get major macro-blocking on Windows QuickTime. Looks fine on OS X.

2) I burned the DVD. As expected it combs like mad in OS X's DVD Player 4.0. However, the good news is that my two DVD players (both progressive scan, with a progressive scan TV) seem to deinterlace it fine on-the-fly, without combing artifacts even at the beginning. Does iDVD put a video flag on the stream? (Mine are OK deinterlacers but aren't top notch deinterlacers).

3) I found the HQ setting and the single-field setting in QT's movie properties, but they don't seem to do anything. Perhaps I'm not setting it up right, I dunno.

Anyways, in case you're wondering why I'm concerned if my DVD players seem to work fine with it. The reason is that sometimes I might want to output video at full rez, and burn them to CD, as a raw image file on the disc.

Maybe I'll just stick with DVDs. Ironically, while DVD Player 4.0 on Panther combs like h3ll, Windows DVD players deinterlace these discs just fine. Apple really needs to work on deinterlacing for their shipping DVD player, esp. since Macs are supposed to be multimedia-friendly. It's a shame to burn a nice iMovie/iDVD disc with full cool-looking motion menus, only to have it look like crap because of combing with Apple's DVD player.

vlc does work by the way, but vlc has its own problems. However, if vlc can do it, surely Apple should be able to do it.

[buddhabelly]

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
well, there is a filter (as you described it). go to Movie Properties, Video Track, High Quality, and select Single Field. but obviously all that does is drop half the data

Isn't there a way to get VLC to output a new video file? I was wondering because for most purposes, the blend deinterlacing in is good for me.

EDIT:I just say "filter" because it's under video filters in FCP. Sorry.

[Uncle Skeleton]

oh, I meant that jab at QT, not you
like, it's as poor as you described it