6 replies to this topic

[Ian R. Brown]

I have used a Philips DVD Recorder to record a number of short items off air using the best quality setting (1 hour) on a DVD+RW.

These items have been converted in Toast Titanium 7 (using the default settings) into DV for editing in Final Cut Express 3.0 and iMovie 5.

Some play incredibly smoothly whilst others exhibit tremendous jitter on movement when played on a TV. It also occurs on DVDs burned from my own Mini-DV Tapes.

The judder can be removed by using either the De-interlace Filter in FCE or by converting in Toast using Progressive Scan.

I am at a loss to understand why one video is affected and another is not.

Originally I thought it might be caused by movement in big close-ups and then I suspected that it may be American (NTSC) programmes appearing on British TV.

However, I have had to give up these theories as one lot of jitter appeared on medium shots from a British programme.

Has anyone else experienced this and does anyone know its cause?

Edited by Ian R. Brown, 21 December 2006 - 01:27 AM.

[tsantee]

The jitter is caused by incorrect field dominance for the interlacing fields. I, too, don't understand why it would be an issue for some but not all the clips. Apple's support site has articles about the field dominance issue.

Toast's custom encoder window has a setting where you can force the field dominance to be upper or lower field first. The default is automatic in which Toast uses the normal field dominance for the kind of video that's being encoded. I'm not sure which one to recommend to you.

[Ian R. Brown]

Thanks for your reply. I have searched for the option to alter field dominance but can't find it. All I can find is a deinterlace filter with no adjustments of any kind.

It's not a serious problem as normally I copy DVDs to DV with an Analogue/Digital Converter which does it much faster (in realtime) and which produces quality at least as good and without any of the dreaded judder.

It's just that Toast is supposed to do it and I don't like mysteries!

Ian.

[tsantee]

Ian R. Brown, on Dec 21 2006, 08:36 AM, said:

Thanks for your reply. I have searched for the option to alter field dominance but can't find it. All I can find is a deinterlace filter with no adjustments of any kind.

It's not a serious problem as normally I copy DVDs to DV with an Analogue/Digital Converter which does it much faster (in realtime) and which produces quality at least as good and without any of the dreaded judder.

It's just that Toast is supposed to do it and I don't like mysteries!

Ian.

In the Toast Formats side bar click More. In the window that appears click Encoding. Click the Custom button. There you'll see the Field Dominance preset. This only applies when Toast is doing the MPEG 2 encoding. It won't change the field dominance of existing MPEG videos.

[Ian R. Brown]

tsantee, on Dec 21 2006, 10:15 AM, said:

In the Toast Formats side bar click More. In the window that appears click Encoding. Click the Custom button. There you'll see the Field Dominance preset. This only applies when Toast is doing the MPEG 2 encoding. It won't change the field dominance of existing MPEG videos.

Thanks again tsantee.

I am not sure whether that dominance setting will apply to what I am doing (converting/exporting DVD to a DV file). I suspect it only applies to copying one DVD to another. Anyway I will give it a test.

I have noticed that Toast has numerous facilities which are almost hidden away - like the one you have pointed out. The instruction book is poor in this respect because it only deals with the basic operations and boringly repeats itself over and over again.

Do you know of any book or article that deals with every one (or at least "most") of these "hidden adjustments"? I suppose they are there for everyone to see really, but you just don't notice them!

Ian.

[tsantee]

Ian R. Brown, on Dec 22 2006, 12:51 AM, said:

Thanks again tsantee.

I am not sure whether that dominance setting will apply to what I am doing (converting/exporting DVD to a DV file). I suspect it only applies to copying one DVD to another. Anyway I will give it a test.

I have noticed that Toast has numerous facilities which are almost hidden away - like the one you have pointed out. The instruction book is poor in this respect because it only deals with the basic operations and boringly repeats itself over and over again.

Do you know of any book or article that deals with every one (or at least "most") of these "hidden adjustments"? I suppose they are there for everyone to see really, but you just don't notice them!

Ian.

You are correct that the field dominance only applies during the MPEG encoding and not during the export to DV. A couple excellent places to get Final Cut info are www.kenstone.net and the Final Cut Pro forum at discussions.apple.com.

The Getting Started Guide and Toast Help are the only documentation for Toast. There also are some knowledgebase articles on Roxio's site. I've considered writing and self-publishing a more comprehensive manual but then I encounter a rash of posts here with questions that totally confound me. But I'm pondering....

[Ian R. Brown]

If you do get round to writing something, I for one, would be only too ready to read it.

Thanks for recommending the FCE forum - but I am usually dishing out the info on it!

It was because there was a general lack of knowledge of the finer workings of Toast, on the FC Forums that I took a trip over here to see what I could discover.

Ian.

Edited by Ian R. Brown, 22 December 2006 - 10:10 AM.