Produxion

Oops.

After I finished writing my last post on interlacing, I realised that I missed out one important aspect of the whole de-interlacing discussion, and more specifically, another very good reason why you would want to use de-interlacing: creating a film-look for your video.

When you watch most soap opera or current affairs programmes on TV, you’ll notice that they have a much sharper and crisper look than the picture of a drama or film you watch on the same TV. It has a distinctly “video” look to it, which creates a very immediate and “real” image.

Part of that is down to the way images are captured on most video cameras, and the way in which the signal is processed. There are video formats which create a softer, richer image, such as digi-beta. But for those of us who work with cheaper, less-cumbersome formats (such as DV, HDV, XDCAM etc) there remains the issue of how to change that “video” look to one which looks more like film.

Well, there are three basic things I do which create that magical film-look.

Last weekend, my Mum took part in the first Great North Swim in Windermere. It was the first mass participation swim event of its kind in Great Britain, and it was the first time she’d trained for any kind of swimming event.

A group of us went along to support her, and we filmed a few bits throughout the day – nothing serious, but then I edited the footage together to make this little diary of our outing.

Having done a fair amount of video editing which involves working with, or converting to different resolutions, I’ve stumbled across a lot of problems in the past which are caused by interlacing. In a recent post, I wrote about my workflow for down-converting from HDV to SD, which included a step for de-interlacing footage to (…)