Tutorial Details
- Requirements: Just After Effects... enjoy!
Download Source Files
I decided to record this video, because I noticed that there are many After Effects artists who don’t know how to deal with interlaced video to be delivered to television. Many of us treat the interlaced feature of the footage as something that has to be removed at once. Don’t de-interlace everything you get. When you deliver something to TV, you can benefit from interlacing.
In this tutorial I try to explain what interlacing really means, why the television works this way, and how we should deal with the interlaced nature of TV. Did you know that progressive footage may sometimes be rejected by the TV station? Why does your footage look a bit different on a TV set, even if it is progressive LCD or plasma? Why do TV shows look different than movies? Is this only because of the color correction? I try to answer those questions. Simple as that. Don’t expect to see any fancy, exiting techniques. Just knowledge that may help you not to make little mistakes.
Tutorial
Download Tutorial .flv
File size 66MB
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By Bartek Skorupa
How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer
Use your motion graphics skills to build a freelance business with this authoritative guide on freelancing written by the authors of the super popular FreelanceSwitch blog.
Join our newsletter!
Wired Logo Reveal only $8.00 
IT logo identity only $12.00 
Q.Shawesh-Demo Reel 2011 - More
After Effects Basix
Just getting started? Start with our basix tutorials on the fundamentals. View All Basix Tutorials
Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Aetuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Great tutorial.
Very interesting and very useful.
haha, good tutorial, nice humor, potty mouth!
wow!!! this is sooo helpful!! thanks very very much… i mean tutorials with after effects about the effects are nice, but to show how to finish the work if u have a client with a task is just amazing! great tut!
lol you spelt “exciting” wrong
not much joy in your life i guess.
sad…
You spelled “spelled” wrong.
Hey super,
und wenn du in einer anderen Sprachen etwas posten würdest, wäre das fehlerfrei?
Buchstabiere mal: Ei!
“Sprache”, nicht “Sprachen”.
tsk tsk
That was a very nice and very useful tutorial.
thank you for shearing your knowledge with us.
Ran B.A
Great tut, well explained and presented.
Hi,
Thanks for the informative tutorial
Wonder if anyone can help…
I live in PAL land
I am finalizing a short shot on 8mm film camera. It was telecined and put onto digibeta tape, then uploaded to my computer via a sony J30 and Firewire. The result is DV PAL footage right? Which means it is lower field first? I like to think I understand the process because I’ve spent so long thinking about it, but likewise I still don’t get the meaning of life!
Many thanks to the community in advance
Sam
@ Sam:
Your footage was shot on the film/negative, so it is progressive. Both fields represent the same picture, so in this case the field order is irrelevant. In such case you have to interpret your footage so that it doesn’t separate fields. You will get exactly the same no matter if you capture this via DigiBeta (Upper Field First) or via DV (Lower Field First). Of-course there will be quality difference resulting from DV compression, but the field order in this case will not matter.
@ Bartek:
Many thanks for the response. Yeah, I understand that its progressive on the negative. I just dropped a source file (uploaded from a digibeta tape) into after effects and set interpret footage to not separate fields. The result was an interlaced image. Separating the fields to either upper or lower got rid of the interlacing and the result played smoothly irrespective of field order. When I imported it into after effects it automatically separated fields to lower field first, as too did sony vegas pro. Basically I had a problem with some clips that I had worked on in after effects, rendered out quicktime animation lower field first and dropped them back onto my sony vegas timeline. Turns out that even though I had set up my vegas project properties correctly as per the source footage (lower field first), the clips that had been rendered out of after effects as lower field first were being interpreted as upper field first. So when I rendered out an Mpeg-2 DVD and authored it in encore, playback was jittery on all the clips that had been worked on in after effects. All is ok now and everything plays smoothly. A problem solved, but I’m out of my depth with this stuff! Trial and error will hopefully get me there…
Many thanks
Sam
Nice tutorial, I know this things but it was useful to refresh my knowledge
I need proof that PAL is upper field first!
PAL Television is upper field first.
PAL DV is lower field first.
“PAL Television is upper field first.
PAL DV is lower field first.”
It’s not true … There are no rules for this.
Hi Bartek,
Nice Tut! Many thanks for taking the time to make this.
Here is some further important information. I think PAL CCIR 601 Standards require RGB Black to be clipped at 16 and white at 235 so your adjustment layer at 240 may not be enough to limit your luminance values. It may also not be enough to limit the Composite Gamut levels (Colour Saturation).
My second point is that the title/safe action grid shows two boundaries the inner is safe title. Your title has to be inside this line to be viewable on older CRT’s. The outer boundary line of the title/safe action is for action only and is more a guide as to what is going to be seen rather than what is going to be readable. (this is probably not a good explanation , sorry) But the title in your tutorial was definitely outside of safe Title area and could also be rejected for this.
Anyway, many thanks once again for this very good tutorial.
Cheers!
Thank you for the comment.
Regarding colour safe: Of-course my solution is not accurate, but solves 99% of problems the easy way.
I just wanted to make people aware that something like safe colours exist. When working in my normal environment – I use external device to measure the safe colours.
Title/action safe: I know that I’ve put my titles outside title safe, but when working with this kind of subtitles – it can be done. I’ve done it this way zillion times and it was never rejected.
Very useful !!!
Thanks!
Big time Techtutorial – Thanks man!
That’s was very interesting, I really didn’t understand interlace and upper fields until now. Now that I think about I’ve seen that on the news intro before…I’m gonna watch this again, thankz!!
More information about interlacing and fields:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS725e431141e7ba651e63e3d124985b84f9-8000.html
More information about broadcast-safe colors:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WSE0A9B424-9673-4fd0-BED7-2ED4E1EB1E8Da.html
very very nice tutorial, been looking for this a long time.
I thought when using interlaced footage, you should make a comp that has double the frame rate (for PAL 59.98) so there is one field per frame. Then when you comp some text over it, and render it with a normal frame rate, the text should look fine.
Hello AE community,
Congratulations on your tutorial !
You can’t imagine how useful it was to many of us!
I would greatly love if you present us another one with further explanation and examples.
Let’s say for instance what if we deal with AVCHD 50i footage for Pal TV or if we have a DV material(lower field first) also oriented for Pal TV ( which is Upper field first.)
I hope you understand my anxiety
I ‘m really interesting in having deeper knowledge on the subject.
Thanks in advance
newbie
There are several ways of dealing with field order. Let’s say you have DV footage (lower field first) and want to deliver it with the field order – upper field first.
Solution 1: Interpret the footage – lower field first and set the render settings – upper field first.
Solution 2: This is a little trick that I often use: Interpret the footage – “Separate fields: Off”. Move the footage exactly 1 pixel up. Add Motion tile to fill one missing line at the bottom. Render it without fields.
The second solution is good when you don’t want to make any transformations to your footage, i.e. you don’t scale it, you don’t change its position or rotation. In this case the solution 2 is better, because you will deliver exactly what was shot. There will be no artificial lines except the one at the bottom.
If you use the first solution – the picture you render will contain only artificially created pixels. This will be the result of interpolation. If you understand how de-interlacing is done – you know why it is so.
Thank you Bartek for your quick response !!
Once again it was great help .
Very helpful sir, thanks a lot, i use to work with ntsc, is the same situation when we work with tv?
Thank you
I like your style, I saw that nice little hole you were preparing in the beginning coming by miiiiles away, but it was fun. I’ve really learnt something here. Thank you.
Thanks, Bartek. That was incredibly helpful. I’ve had a reasonable, but still vague knowledge of how to deal with interlacing correctly, and this video, plus the comments have gone a long way to expanding that.
Those are the things that are hard to learn without someone explaining properly. Or at least, let’s say even if you know well about this, there are nearly no tutorials explaining how exactly to deal with interlacing in AE. Very valuable tutorial here!
And i lol’d cause the ad running in aetuts+ player before the tutorial is interlaced and looks horrible on PC screen