Hello-

My dv footage was all shot in progressive scan mode and I want to capture it in Premiere on Windows 98 (microsoft DV codec). I don't want to deal with fields rendering options/consistancy etc... Can I capture this footage without fields? And continue to edit and display that way too? Ultimately it will go back to DV and then who knows.

Thanks for your knowledge ND

-- Nif D. (niffer@speakeasy.net), April 13, 2002

Answers

As I see it you don't actually capture DV - you just transfer to your harddisk. I have tested progressive scan and it's no problem because both fields is used but they are from the same moment in time. Premiere will never know the difference. I have not tested but I assume you should turn off fields when rendering effects so they don't make fields you don't want.

-- Prohias (prohiasprohiason@hotmail.com), July 05, 2002.

I've been researching the same issue. The high end Canon miniDV's will capture your video as progressive, true, but what they don't tell you is that the video camera itself conforms to the dv standard. In order for a camera to bear the dv logo, it must absolutley conform to certain principles in the way it deals with the video. Therefore, your high end camera which has the great luxury of capturing progressive scan for fantastic video quality, will send the video out through the firewire as interlaced (bottom field first most likely) which is the standard for even a $100 miniDV camera. If you wish to convert this video to DVD, you will have to properly process it back into progressive before it will be converted to mpeg 2 interlaced. Frustrating? YES IT IS. You'd think with all this genius in technology someone would come along and developed the DV2 video standard which would let a camera company like Canon provide a switch that would let you send the video out as geniune progressive scan. That would make for sure excellent smooth editing too. And althoug the high end progressive captures which were converted to interlacing are better quality images, it's still interlacing.. and thats not good. If you put in the search word "interlaced video problem" into google, you'll get like 1,000,000 hits. People all over the world from everywhere you can think off all scratching their heads and trying get rid of ugly razor cuts throug their video. Trying out endless deinterlacing software filters which will sometimes blur the horizontal scan or overly remove the razor cut artifacts and dull the resolution. With more and more people getting into video editing these days, something has to give. This ancient interlaced technology was a great idea when it came out and it actually does work well in most cases.. but it's time has come and gone. I don't want 1940's technology anywhere near my $2000 miniDV, do you? With all this computer oriented desktop publishing and real time internet streaming of progressive video, you'd think someone would have a little light bulb flash above their head..? maybe the bulb is interlaced and it's hard to see? :-/

As of now, I'm capturing my interlaced dv using Sonic Foundrys Video Vegas 4.0. It has some well designed deinterlacing routines, though they are not very sophisticated, but they seem to work ok in most cases. I never do get the quality of the original image though. I always lose an average 5 to 8% of my original image quality, every time. And there is nothing I can do about it.

-- Grant Anderson (granta1969@hotmail.com), October 16, 2003.