Thanks to all who posted. I think the problem is the camera. What I really want is to find a way in post to make a consumer camera look as close to possible to pro-sumer camera. I'm not sure this can be done. After I posted, I called FCP tech support, and the tech suggested trying a blur filter and a maybe a sharpen filter. I'm pretty new to FCS, and I've not tried this kind of thing before -- suggestions?
You might have screwed up the Field Order someplace along the way. Any sort of resizing, vertical moving, speeding up/down and/or reversing of footage can foul up the field order. IIRC there is a field order conversion that happens in Compressor, which is another possible point of failure, and unnecessarily de-interlacing will also negatively impact the footage quality.
Was the 50" TV HD or SD? SD on a 50" HDTV isn't going to be pretty no matter what you do.
Lethal
I just made another short sample SD DVD, combining the same AVCHD (to AIC) footage with some professional HDV footage from a training book, and compressed it into MPEG-2. Both the HDV and AVCHD use upper field dominance, and I just dropped the clips in without modification, but I'll check compression settings to make sure I didn't screw up the field order settings there. So far I've just watched it with my computer DVD Player (which does not show the interlace), but the HDV footage already looks a lot better than my AVCHD. The TV I watched on was 50” 1080, fed by SD DVD. Won’t have access to that until next weekend, but I can watch on a smaller 1080 TV this eve.
Compressor has this feature and
Red Giant software's "
Frames" and "
Instant HD" have this as well.
I actually was not wanting to de-interlace this footage, but I will want to de-interlace in the future, and I hear FCS does not have a very good de-interlacer, so I appropriate the suggestions.
I use this workflow[/URL] (Compressor Version) for my HV30 (when shooting 24f). I think it should work the same for your camera since it also shoots 24f over 60i.
I also will surely be working with HDV into 24P sometime, so thins for the link to the workflow for this.
Here is a video the covers the stabilizer feature
I checked out the Motion video, but I could not find any discussion on the SmoothCam and Image stabilization features. I thought this was primarily correcting shaky images rather than smoothing jagged lines, but I'm interested on how you think it will help here.
