Horizontal Jaggies with HD 1080 in Toast

[David See]

Hi all,

 

I have never experienced a problem with Toast until now.

 

I am shooting and editing 1080i50 PAL HD - exporting out of FCP into a self-contained equivalent PAL HD file.

 

I want to make SD copies of the project on DVD.

 

I imported the finished HD file into Toast, let it encode and burn, and once finished, I watched it on our PAL Plasma.

 

The finished DVD has horizontal thick lines showing when there is any movement in the shot. Regardless of whether it is being played in a standalone DVD player into the Plasma, or on the mac, the playback is the same...horizontal jaggies all over the place. The picture quality is excellent apart from that.

 

Would anyone have a solution for this please?

 

Should I export the HD timeline in FCP to an SD file BEFORE importing it into Toast? Would this make a difference?

 

This is a real worry for me because I am shooting more and more things in HD that are yet to be edited/encoded/burned to SD.

 

Cheers,

 

David

[tsantee]

I'm trying to recall how I worked around a similar issue with my brother's HD video to SD video DVD. As I recall we found that it worked very well to choose the custom quicktime movie export, choose the DV50 codec and choose progressive for the fields. That resulted in a video that Toast encoded to a beautiful anamorphic 16:9 video DVD with that jaggies all gone.

[jupasa]

I imported the finished HD file into Toast, let it encode and burn, and once finished, I watched it on our PAL Plasma.

 

The finished DVD has horizontal thick lines showing when there is any movement in the shot. Regardless of whether it is being played in a standalone DVD player into the Plasma, or on the mac, the playback is the same...horizontal jaggies all over the place. The picture quality is excellent apart from that.

I too have this problem. Burning 1080i to SD DVD results to thick interlacing lines. The suggestion above seems to work but it is not ideal. My clips are 1080i AIC interlaced (exported from iMovie 09). It takes too long to re-export every project to DV50.

 

Can anyone else verify having this problem?

 

Btw: this problem does not occur with iDVD. The only problem is that motion is not smooth. Maybe that is inevitable due to the 1080i > 576i conversion.

[tsantee]

I too have this problem. Burning 1080i to SD DVD results to thick interlacing lines. The suggestion above seems to work but it is not ideal. My clips are 1080i AIC interlaced (exported from iMovie 09). It takes too long to re-export every project to DV50.

 

Can anyone else verify having this problem?

 

Btw: this problem does not occur with iDVD. The only problem is that motion is not smooth. Maybe that is inevitable due to the 1080i > 576i conversion.

If the problem only happens where there is motion then it very likely is a field dominance issue where Toast is choosing the wrong field (either upper or lower) field first when it should be the other way around. In the custom encoder settings window there is an option to force which interlacing field is first. I suggest testing with a short clip of an action scene to see if changing the field dominance setting cures the problem. Let me know what you find out.

[jupasa]

If the problem only happens where there is motion then it very likely is a field dominance issue where Toast is choosing the wrong field (either upper or lower) field first when it should be the other way around. In the custom encoder settings window there is an option to force which interlacing field is first. I suggest testing with a short clip of an action scene to see if changing the field dominance setting cures the problem. Let me know what you find out.

 

I thought of that too and tried the different settings (top, bottom, progressive). No help.

[tsantee]

I thought of that too and tried the different settings (top, bottom, progressive). No help.

Then my next best guess is to use FCP to export to SD so Toast isn't required to do any rescaling.

 

I just had Toast make a NTSC video DVD from a 720p HD video captured with my EyeTV. There are jitters around moving edges when I play the video on my DVD player and the DVD player is set for interlacing. When I change the player to show progressive then the jitters are much reduced. Still, I'm going to experiment more with this.