Adobe Premiere Pro: I used DV footage and Photoshop stills - how to export?

[neckneck]

I have a source clip that's a 720x480 BFF interlaced NTSC DV video file. I edited this in Premiere Pro CS3, and added some effects (transitions, color correction) and stills (Photoshop PSDs with the same settings as for my project). I want to author this to DVD using Adobe Encore, to be watched on television screens.

I read beforehand that interlaced DV footage doesn't need to be deinterlaced, so I didn't. But when I export my final movie from Premiere as a Microsoft DV AVI, I get a "double interlaced" result, having extreme interlacing on moving parts. This looks really bad. I kinda figured because the original footage is interlaced, Premier would just leave it alone.

How do I export this movie so I can use it in Adobe Encore? I also tried exporting as a non-interlaced HuffyUV AVI, but this results in a "normal" interlaced AVI that get "double interlacing" again when I export it from Adobe Encore.

The only solution I can come up with is to deinterlace my original source footage, but I'm not sure if that the right way to fix this problem.

If anybody has a solution, I'd be very interested!

[poisondeathray]

Can you explain what you mean by "double interlaced" ? or post a sample to illustrate?

How are you watching it? If you enable deinterlacing for playback in your media player does it solve the problem (e.g in vlc enable deinterlacing)?

[neckneck]

By double interlaced I mean there is extreme interlacing, like it took the interlaced footage and interlaced it again. Deinterlacing in VLC reduces the jagged edges, but then it still looks like normal interlaced footage.

I just wonder how other people who use interlaced DV footage export their final movie from Premiere to be used in Encore... I tried it all (bottom field first, top field first, deinterlaced), but it all looks jagged

[poisondeathray]

This doesn't make any sense. If you used the proper sequence settings and export settings for DV-AVI, it should keep the same field order, and interlacing.

Can you see this in the program monitor preview before exporting? If not, then it's more likely an issue with render settings. If yes, then it's more likely an issue with your sequence settings or sources

If your exported file from Premiere is "normal" , then it's likely an issue with Encore, or the settings you used in Encore.

It works for me on CS4, I've never seen or heard of what you're describing.

[neckneck]

I must say I have a hard time describing what is happening, so I'm not surprised if it doesn't make any sense. Thanks for bearing with me anyway.

I now exported the movie using Adobe Media Encoder. NTSC, 29.97 fps, lower field order -- all settings match the ones of the original DV footage. But I still get interlacing/jagged edges.

Please see the attached image: on the left is the orignal MPG produced by Adobe Media Encoder (from inside Premiere Pro) as shown in VLC, on the right is the same frame deinterlaced using blend mode in VLC. It still looks a lot more jagged than the original footage.

Is this because I'm using film effects and color correction on the footage? What am I doing wrong?

[poisondeathray]

What effects are you using? Regardless, color correction and effects shouldn't affect it like that. When you look in the preview within premiere does it look like that?

Part of it looks like macroblocking from low bitrate, which might affect the deinterlacing. What export bitrate are you using? Try increasing it

Footage with motion and noise are the parts are the most negatively affected by low bitrate, and the picture will break apart with macroblocking. If the deinterlacing algorithm used cannot compensate for that, it might what you are seeing there. If you notice the edge of the sleave and lower part of the arm has macroblocking the in the left picture, whereas the other edges like the sand grains, dark edges do not. In the right picture, only those areas which had macroblocking are affected, and the other edges that didn't have macroblocking look cleaner. To test this, if you did the same export with Huffyuv (interlaced), and still got the artifacts, then it's NOT due to low bitrate MPEG2

[neckneck]

Please see the attached image for the HuffyUV export (interlaced, BFF (lower field first)).

It's still doesn't look good, so I'm thinking it's not the low bitrate. Also, in later shots, detailed things like the hay on the floor will look really "jumpy". (Like it's sparkling or moving, I hope this makes sense). It looks worse than the original footage, anyway.

I'm really at a loss here. I just can't get it to look good once it leaves Premiere. I'm contemplating just deinterlacing the original footage in VirtualDub (by just a simple blend), and just accept the quality loss/blurring...

EDIT: Actually, on closer inspection of the same clip in the original DV file, this HuffyUV export doesn't look bad at all. I'll run some more tests , but so far it looks like I've been making mistakes in my original attempts to do a proper export.

Poisondeathray, is the resulting interlaced HuffyUV movie importable in Encore, or will Encore try to interlace it again when it converts to DVD/MPEG?

[poisondeathray]

That looks about right. VLC's deinterlacer isn't that good. The residual jaggies are aliasing artifacts from a low quality deinterlacer algorithm because it's meant for real time function in software mode

Use an avisynth deinterlacer if you want very high quality. The high quality ones work less than realtime (ie. very slow and CPU intensive) and are meant for offline processing. The DVD player should give decent deinterlacing results as well (I think), as it's hardware based and meant for deinterlacing

If you upload a sample clip of this section, I think I can demonstrate this

[neckneck]

Poisondeathray, please see my edit above! If Encore will happily take this file and make a proper DVD of it, I'll be a happy man!

[poisondeathray]

I'm not sure if encore will accept huffyuv avi streams for encoding. Try importing the test clip and see if it gives you error messages. If it does work, make sure you maximize the bitrate

When I've done similiar projects in the past, I've always encoded my assets first to .m2v. Although in CS4 you should be able to dynamically link straight from Premiere too without the intermediate (not sure if you can in CS3)?

Although if you used the same MPEG2 settings as you did in the first picture from the AME exporting of MPEG2, it will look just as bad since Encore uses the same Mainconcept MPEG2 encoder as AME. Things you could do to improve this would be

a) use higher bitrate
b) use another encoder (HCEnc is much better for higher complexity content, ie. relative lower bitrate encodes)
c) preprocess with denoising filters , to improve compressiblity
d) stabilize the footage, to improve compressiblity

[neckneck]

Actually Encore does, and that brings me back to the situation that started my school play encoding troubles. I built my DVD project from Encore using an (in retrospect properly) interlaced HuffyUV movie. I used automatic transcoding settings though, which resulted in the "double interlace" from my original post.

So I'm now building the project again with the settings "NTSC DV High Quality 7Mb VBR 2 Pass". I hope this will result in a nice looking DVD!

Poisondeathray, thanks for talking me through this. I'll report back on how this second build worked out!

[poisondeathray]

I would go higher if you could, even 8-9Mbps if your project is short enough that you can fit it on a DVD5/9. Use a bitrate calculator

https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

[neckneck]

Hmm. Well, yes, I will be using the same settings in Encore, so if Encore uses the same encoder as Premiere, it'll probably result in the same bad quality movie...

I'm kinda disappointed these two Adobe products can't handle a decent quality export to DVD. Basically I'm left to either tweak things (like your options a, c and d) or use a different encoder altogether (option b). I'll be doing this a lot in the near future, so I better read up on which encoders are best. Thanks for pointing me to HCEnc!