Reconciling different Field Order

[vegasarian]

I have a project - MPEG2 - DV - Lower field first. I have been given some very valuable footage but it was shot on an HDD camcorder and is MPEG2 - UPPER field first. This footage is vital to the project. How best to mix the field orders? I have Vegas 8 and Womble

[guns1inger]

When you import the footage into Vegas you can right-click on the clips, select Properties, and set the field order to match whatever the source footage is. When you output, all footage will rendered to the output field order. I would set the project properties the field order of the majority of the footage, but you may need to do some test renders to be sure.

[Safesurfer]

What about moving one of the clips down by 1 pix, that would effectively change the field dominance. If displayed on TV, you wouldn't see this due to overscan. There are filters for doing this in Avisynth and VDub as well.

[vegasarian]

Thanks guys.
Would that be this one Safesurfer....?
http://neuron2.net/reverse/reverse.html

[minidv2dvd]

I have a project - MPEG2 - DV - Lower field first

which is it? it can't be both mpeg-2 and DV. and what is your final output going to be? i'd make the project DVavi widesreen if you are going to include HD cam footage. you will have to live with black side borders for any 4:3 material but it's better than top and bottom bars on the 16/9 material. if you plan on cropping the HD stuff i'd convert it to a lossless avi first and then start editing it. long gop HD cam material is not editor friendly at all.

vegas is fairly smart and mixing different field orders should not be a problem, as long as they are properly identified in the file browser. right click on each file and select properties, make sure pixel aspect ratio and field order are correct. do not just change the files field order. i've used mixed media without any problem.

[vegasarian]

Just in case anyone else comes across this prob in the future heres what gave me the best result.
Demuxed the UFF footage in TMPGEnc, ran it through 'ReStream' and remuxed in TMPGEnc. now they all play nice together in Lower Field First.

[Safesurfer]

Thanks guys.
Would that be this one Safesurfer....?
http://neuron2.net/reverse/reverse.html

Yes, that's the VDub one.

For Avisynth see either

http://www.geocities.com/siwalters_uk/reversefielddominance.html

or

http://avisynth.org/stickboy/

[gadgetguy]

Thanks guys.
Would that be this one Safesurfer....?
http://neuron2.net/reverse/reverse.html

Yes, that's the VDub one.

For Avisynth see either

http://www.geocities.com/siwalters_uk/reversefielddominance.html

or

http://avisynth.org/stickboy/

Is there an advantage to using one of these in AviSynth as opposed to the built in ComplementParity()?

[Safesurfer]

Is there an advantage to using one of these in AviSynth as opposed to the built in ComplimentParity()?

I believe that would just result in a field swap. See Donald Graft's explanation in the quote below from his VDub filter page as to why that's not good.

One may be tempted to simply swap the fields. This will reverse the field dominance, but it is not a correct solution. Field dominance refers to which field is displayed first in time, i.e., temporal order. Swapping fields means interchanging the fields of a frame. Swapping fields will reverse the temporal order, but it will also interchange each pair of lines, putting them spatially in the wrong position.

See also this discussion on Doom9 that led to both filters.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=268353#post268353