Thanks!  It was set to "balanced," which didn't occur to me what it referred to. 

Good to know about flickering and MP4's.  I've been using the Progressive setting with the MPG2-DVD setting.  I hope it doesn't hurt to leave suppress flickering on with other than mpg4's.

Happy New Year!

Kami

Hi Kami

. . . . . but it doesn't have the quality setting (if it does, I haven't found it). . . . .

 

. . . . I see a setting "apply anti-interlace filter (suppresses flickering . . . .

I always keep this on.

. . . . I read somewhere in the Help file suppressing flickering applies to stills. . . . .

Only applies to interlaced video - it suppresses flickering when interlaced video is converted to progressive, eg when exporting as MP4.

The flickering makes MP4's virually unwatchable when interlaced video has been converted to progressive without this filter turned on.

HTH

John EB

Hi John and Kami

All the best for the New year!

Only applies to interlaced video - it suppresses flickering when interlaced video is converted to progressive, eg when exporting as MP4.

I don't agree with you John but this area is quite confusing in MEP. My understanding is that this is designed to help reduce resizing artifacts when Hi resolution stills are reduced (and or animated ie. pans or zooms)  to the export resolution of the movie say from greater than 4K to HD or SD resn. as referred to in Help:-

"Anti interface filter: Choose this option for still pictures with detailed structures and high contrast. This filter reduces line flickering during TV playback."

Confusing in that a Rt click on the timeline object shows a selection and when selected a pop up window directs you to turn it on in the export settings for that object (and not necesarily for the whole movie!) So does it apply it to all objects or just the ones you Rt click and select "Anti interlace filter" on.

Note that there is also a Rt click selection for saving a still frame from an interlaced movie clip described in help"-

"Interpolation for interlace material: Select this option to remove interlace artifacts from the (video) image. If, for instance, you extract still shots from a video, interlace artifacts appear in sequences which feature movement."

IOW it saves the still as a deinterlaced frame.

Both of these selections are described in Help as "Image improvements for individual objects" so I think they only apply to clips that you select and apply Rt click to.

In the case of your MP4 - was it an HD video being converted to SD resolution on export? If so the Magix explanation of the AI Filter may have been playing a part. I seem to remember doing a whole lot of tests way back and finding that it is applying a softening effect or reduction of resolution and this can be varied in the overall "Movie Effects settings" under the Sharpness tab as described in Help:-

"Anti-flickering filter intensity: The anti-flickering filter affects only still images. It is especially intended for zooms in images with many edges and transitions with high contrast (e.g. fences, bars, brick walls). High-frequency images such as these begin to flicker when they are reduced in size. This filter smoothes these edges somewhat.
You should set the intensity of the anti-flickering filter according to your preferences, because smoothing is always a compromise between good contrast and fluid image sequence during playback.

So more potential confusion, and from memory the experience that this setting sometimes does more harm than good. As this settings slider is on 0 by default it may mean that the checked box in the export window may have little effect in some cases, but I always deselect AIF option for general export unless I am getting jittering problems.

As far as interlaced video clips go, I think Magix advice is that if your interlaced clips in your progressive export turn out jittery then you should Rt.Click the clip and go to "Object properties" tab and change the Interlace attributes in the "Calculation of Intermediate images" tab prior to export.

Kami - I did some short tests with the Quality settings with the Intel default encoder with some MPEG4 50P HD material using Harware acceleration with Quicksync on my new I7 system and could not find a time difference between Best and Fastest, but with SW encoding (CPU only) Best took 4x as long as Fastest with not a lot of difference in quality. Balanced seemed to be the best setting for speed and good quality and set on this the encode only took twice as long with SW as with HW.

Cheers

Peter
 

Hi Peter

I agree the use of the 'Apply anti interlace flickering filter' is confusing.

From practical experience of using interlaced video and exporting to progressive, without this filter option on the video can be virtually unwatchable, expecially where there is movement,  due to flickering caused by the combining of 2 fields, which are spaced 20ms apart, together to get one frame.

With moving objects which are not in the same position between fields - this also gives rise to 'combing' which is another problem that arises with interlaced to progressive conversion.

AFAICS leaving this option turned on does not do any harm to the final video.

. . . . Interpolation for interlace material: . . . .

AFAICS this option does not have a significant effect on stills from my interlaced footage.

. . . . In the case of your MP4 - was it an HD video being converted to SD resolution on export? . . . .

The flickering was the same whether exported as 1080p, 720p or 480p.

John EB

Thanks Peter.  I occasionally get short scenes of a few seconds which are very jittery.  They've occurred when using any of the video stabilizers.  In at least one case, removing 1 or 2 *frames* solved the problem.  In other cases, I deleted the jittery scene.

Maybe the next time I have a scene with the jitters I"ll check "no interlace processing" in Calc. of intermediate images just to see what happens. 

Happy NY to you, too.

Kami

Hi John and Kami

All the best for the New year!

As far as interlaced video clips go, I think Magix advice is that if your interlaced clips in your progressive export turn out jittery then you should Rt.Click the clip and go to "Object properties" tab and change the Interlace attributes in the "Calculation of Intermediate images" tab prior to export.

Kami - I did some short tests with the Quality settings with the Intel default encoder with some MPEG4 50P HD material using Harware acceleration with Quicksync on my new I7 system and could not find a time difference between Best and Fastest, but with SW encoding (CPU only) Best took 4x as long as Fastest with not a lot of difference in quality. Balanced seemed to be the best setting for speed and good quality and set on this the encode only took twice as long with SW as with HW.

Cheers

Peter

Thanks for the replies.  After reading them, it's occurred to me how one can know if flickering that can be seen on the timeline is due to interlacing, to very quickly moving objects and/or camera shake.  (Honest, a few times my cam seemed to vibrate even though my hand was still.)

Since I've been using the progressive setting, I haven't been seeing jitters, at least any noticeable ones.  It could be better use of Mercalli, or maybe I'm cutting them all out.  

Kami

Hi,

I now uncheck "Apply anti interlace flickering filter" because I recently found that a still image was blurry as a result. Turning it off solved the problem. As all of my raw video is progressive, I don't have the problem mentioned by John EB.

Hi All

I guess "whatever works" is good but I have tried to outlay the theory that I believe backs the functions for dealing with Interlacing and Flicker in MEP.

John C.B.

I have seen instances on this forum where Magix support have advised people to deselect the AIFF because of odd results with various footage.

I am certain I have found times when there are anomalies with mixed interlaced and progressive footage on the timeline, where interlaced clips do not seem to deinterlace as you would expect when exporting to progressive. This is covered by that facility to change the clips attributes manually in the Object properties "calculation of intermediate images" tab.

John E.B.

. . . . Interpolation for interlace material: . . . .

AFAICS this option does not have a significant effect on stills from my interlaced footage.

 

I think this is designed for when you want to save and print a picture from a frame of video. I imagine that if the frame is just to include in a video that is going to be deinterlaced on export then it would get uninterlaced then, along with the other video footage.

Peter

Hi

. . . . I guess "whatever works" is good  . . . .

I must totally agree with that. 

This is one of those issues where different video and image sources may require different treatments in order to achieve the desired result - what works for one may not work or be the best for another.

In this sort of situation we can say:

     'This works for me and this is why I believe it does, try it and see if it works for you'

I mainly work with Interlaced 25 fps video and still images from my Sony camera, my Sony Sportscam and a Canon DSLR.

I stopped working with Progressive video from another Sportscam  which takes Progressive video but at 30 fps which gives me problems with 'pulldown' - but that is another topic.

. . . . I believe backs the functions for dealing with Interlacing and Flicker in MEP . . . .

@ Peter

That set me thinking about jpg still images and I remembered, from the old days of dial-up modems, that there are two types of jpeg - normal and progressive - the progressive format was used to download the images in stages so at least something appeared as the page was being built up in the browser.

However the name 'progressive' is a misnomer in relation to video because these jpg's are in fact interlaced ie the data is compressed in multiple passes of progressively higher detail and the image is built up 'line by line' in stages..

Do you think the recommendation to use the filter on still images is a catch all for when progressive jpgs are encountered?

John EB