Upper Field 1st or Lower Field 1st ?

Radiation wrote on 4/24/2003, 9:50 AM

Hi,

I have the Pinnacle Studio Delux 8 inc the AVDV board.

I live in the UK and our TV stanfard is Pal.

When rendering / creating a new project in Vegas 4b, should I set it up as Upper Field 1st, or Lower Field 1st.

I'm a bit confused to what diff it makes.

I use SenalyzerLive 2.0 to grab in analogue, and the Studio software to grab in digital (firewire), I am unable to use studio to grab analogue, because if I import the grabbed studio analogue avi file and render it in Vegas, i end up with a bad shacky pic. But if I grab analogue in SenalyzerLive and render it in Vegas, the results are perfect.

I have complained to Pinnacle, and they have tried to sort the problem out, but their fixes did'nt work.

Anyway, I have digresed from the original question (sorry) :-)

Thanks ... Radiation

Comments

riredale wrote on 4/24/2003, 10:40 AM

I'd leave it at whatever the default setting is, but I'd also run a little test to ensure the setting is okay. Take a short avi and render it both ways, then view the results on a TV (not a PC) monitor. The clip using the wrong setting will be almost unwatchable, with major motion artifacts.

One reason for all the confusion is that different products use different settings, and even different terms (upper/lower, top/bottom/ Field1/field2).

mikkie wrote on 4/24/2003, 10:47 AM

TO give you an idea of what interlacing, field order etc. is: http://www.100fps.com/

Someone else with your board will have to chime in with the field order from their experience, or else perhaps the pinnacle site lists it.

If you've got it backwards, your video will be jerky - this is especially apparent stepping thru the vid frame by frame as you'll encounter frames where the action seems to be move in reverse comparred to the previous frame. I think splitting the fields in V/Dub makes it even more apparent.

mike

BJ_M wrote on 4/24/2003, 11:23 AM

that one is bottom field first (as the other poster said - different companies list this different and I know of a couple cases where company A and Company B use the same term but its different field order) .

cmerail wrote on 4/24/2003, 11:50 AM

What about when you capture with a firewire card directly from a dv cam. Is it lower or upperfield?

SonyEPM wrote on 4/24/2003, 12:13 PM

DV is lower (if interlaced).

Radiation wrote on 4/24/2003, 12:20 PM

I did pose this question on the phone to Pinnacle today, which format does my card grab in, and they were unable to answer me, they said if they could find out, they would email me.

So thanks Pinnacle tec support team for your support ..... NOT

Blackout wrote on 4/27/2003, 4:19 PM

The truth is, few ppl even in the manufacturing companies know which field their boards or products/software are running in...ive tried to ask many of them.

The short answer they give you is that if its jumpy/unwatchable...then its the wrong field :S and to swap the order. Thats about as far as most techs are educated. And it gets you by..generally. Tho i hate it when i dont really know whats going on with stuff like this, only that it works....

Blackout

bowman01 wrote on 4/27/2003, 11:21 PM

I agree with blackout, i've had many a problem in the past with jerky rendered video. When i was using premiere and encoding in Cinemacraft encoder i had to encode the mpeg2 file with upper field to remove shimmers and jerkiness... However now i'm using vegas and dvd architect, i've had to play with it all again to see which one comes out right on the tele.

try one way, if it comes our crap, try the other way.

Wolfgang S. wrote on 4/28/2003, 2:31 PM

There are tools like the bitrate viewer you can use to explore that. And tools like the easy changer to switch field order in mepg-streams. For vegas, the right field order for DV-avi should be bottom = lower field first always.