Poor slow motion quality- what to do?

Deanan wrote on 8/11/2008, 8:58 AM

I'm putting together a 25-min. show with photos and video, and am having issues with some of the video clips that we are slow motioning. Some slo-mo clips are fine, but others have jaggies, they are not smooth I am running VMS Platinum 8.0b and Windows XP SP2. I called the Sony helpdesk, and received a couple ideas to try, but so far no luck in fixing.
Here's some more specs:
1) Project properties. Helpdesk said to try putting the Deinterlace Method to Blend Fields. Tried that. Also tried Interlopolate fields. (also put the "full resolution rendering quality" to Best.)
2) Running video (and photos) off of external harddrive, and putting show together on our main machine/harddrive. I thought that may be the issue, but some of the slo mo clips play just fine, so if it was struggling with the external drive connection, seems all slo-mo clips would be fine.
3) Force resample. Under event properties, selected "Force Resample" (Helpdesk suggestion). Doesn't seem to make a difference.
4) Tested different speeds of slo-mo. The longer slo-mo (playback at .552 or less) is definitely lesser quality than a playback rate of .712 or more, but the .712 quality is still unacceptable.
Has anyone had these issues? What did you do to fix? Appreciate any and all suggestions.
thanks,
Dean

Comments

MSmart wrote on 8/11/2008, 3:55 PM

Are you seeing this in the preview window or in your rendered output?

What is the source/format of your video? Anything different between the video that looks good and what doesn't?

Deanan wrote on 8/12/2008, 8:13 AM

Figured it out! (and it was poor quality in the rendered output, to answer your first question). The field order was different in the individual event clips than what was set in the properties for the entire project, and that was causing the slow motion of those events to be poor. The field in project properties is set to "lower field first", but the poor quality clips had field set to "none". When I changed those to "lower field first", the slow motion quality was fixed.
I'm not even sure what the field option is, or does.
What's the difference between Lower field first, Upper field first, or None??
Thanks for pushing me to investigate further what was different between the good and bad clips. It was in the process of doing that , that I found the discrepancies in field order.
fyi...I am using miniDV footage that I captured to my computer using Windows MovieMaker, to answer your second question.

IJM wrote on 8/18/2008, 12:35 PM

I got the same problem .plz let me know once you get the solution
Happy slow motion-Regards
IJM

Deanan wrote on 8/18/2008, 8:19 PM

IJM, see above. My solution is in above post.
Dean