24p fix

For my project I am using live action with blender stuff composted in. I have a Cannon Vixia HV30 High def camcorder that takes great 1080 resolution video. It even does 24p - the option is somewhat buried, but it's in there. Problem is getting 24 p out of a camcorder into anything is a serious PITA. You'd think it would be automatic but not yet. The 24p comes coded out as 60i. Pulldowns and reverse telecine are big long blog entries in their own right (which aren't needed at all in HD digital video but for some reason they are still there) so I won't go into it other than saying that's the stuff you have to undo to get your 24p back. So if you want to get at your 24p video (like to match my blender renders) you need to decode it somehow. After much research I came across a couple ways to do it in compresor and cinema tools, (I think after effects can do it too) but then found much much easier way. Get yourself this freeware program called JES Deinterlacer


---------GET THIS------ http://www.xs4all.nl/~jeschot/home.html ---------GET THIS------


Launch it up, load your movie, select the project box, select reverse telecine and let it do it's thing. And voila, 24p restored. No more weird jaggies and hard to track video.

One more note, In yet another hold over from analog video, quicktime's default display for 1080 lines of resolution is actually 1062 to hide possible analog edge broadcast distortions. (Has 1080 video ever been broadcast in analog? Who made this nonsense a standard?) You don't need it and can get your 1080 back fairly easily. To get rid of this, open the clip in quicktime, cmd-J for the movie property windows thing (or from the windows menu), goto to aperture conform and select 'production' instead of 'clean' and instantly your 1080 lines come back. Save your changed movie and your all done. Then, take it into FCP or wherever and enjoy 24p. Better directions and more info here

You may also have noticed that instead of 1920 columns you have 1440 or something. That is becuase the HDV codec used in the camera uses non-square pixels which when rendered out come out to 1920. Nothing you can do about that. So no true HD yet. (ughhhh I want a red so bad)

Some better written info on all of this here:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/07/13/canon-hv20-24p-pulldown/