Ridding myself of frames and staircases

vitamin_D wrote on 10/8/2003, 1:00 PM
Hey,

There's a little known digital video artist by the name of Leighton Pierce. He teaches video at University of Iowa, if memory serves correctly, and is the recipient of numerous grants for his experimental video work.

To someone like myself, who finds aesthetics and other "artsy" considerations to be most rewarding, his short pieces are breathtaking: in some, images swirl in drippy, melting animated patterns, only to have glimpses of the subject matter emerge and receed in time with audio; other pieces play with time and rhythm; and still others use ingenius techniques to hack reality into discrete pieces that are re-assembled with the precision of an Escher drawing.

One of the more lauded effects of Pierce's work is his play with stepping time of dropped-frame footage: he uses a TRV-900 and shoots on a low-frame-rate setting; once back at the NLE, he will repeat multiple layers of the same footage, offsetting them by a frame at each layer, to create the vivid dissolution and assembly of reality I write of above.

Question: whats the best way to render out 29.97 frame-rate footage in order to achieve the effect of shooting at a low frame-rate? I have the Pixelan plugs and they provide a decent solution, but I'm wondering how to combine the effect with Supersampling in V4 without the use of the Pixelan plug. I'd really like to degrade an image and use supersampling to re-assemble it. I notice that NTSC DV will always render out to 29.97 -- which makes sense -- should I render out to a progressive codec (ala Quicktime or WMV 9) in order to properly fool with this idea?

My second question goes to staircasing on diagonals in footage -- are there tips and tricks you know of that minimize or rid me of this effect entirely? I've been experimenting with DSE's manual de-interlace method found in his V4 Workshop book, and find the results to be compelling, but even these progressive-scan clips look a little jagged-edged at times. Gaussian blur?

Thanks,

- jim

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/8/2003, 1:20 PM
Use undersampling. If you set undersample rate to 0.333 you'll get about 10 (not actually frames, but) discrete images per second. In Vegas 4 you should probably disable resampling to get crisper images. Play with the rate to get the desired image rate.

Progressive would probably be good, but interlaced shouldn't be a problem.

If you render to uncompressed AVI then you can select any frame rate you wish to coincide with the low frame rate that undersampling produces. Since these files have fewer frames per second, they won't be quite so huge as you might expect.

Once you have the low frame rate files created, stack them on multiple tracks offset by whatever gaps you wish. Use the opacity levels to combine them.
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/8/2003, 11:28 PM
a VERY interesting effect is to undersample by a value, rendering to a new track. Then undersample by a slightly different rate, render to new track. Now adjust the opacity of the upper new track to 45%. Check out the look. Pretty interesting. If you really wanna see something unique, reduce opacity of the second track to 45%. Now, you've got 3 tracks of vid, all with different numbers of images in the same number of frames. similar to pixelan, but crisper, and different. This works best with highly contrasted media.