In general, many dance companies have fairly low quality video archives. Often, low is an understatement. It’s fairly common for us to walk into a meeting with a company’s executive director or artistic director, and have them say something along the lines of “Why would anyone want to watch the videos we have? They’re crap!”
90% of the time, we agree. 5% of the time, basic steps can be taken to drastically improve the video, and the other 5% the work is of such cultural or historical value, that it somewhat overrides the low quality footage.
Here’s the thing: incrementally, dance companies are shooting better video. Not on a grand scale, but here and there you see a company step up to improve their video quality, and even the smallest incremental change could be the difference between getting a booking or not. So, without further ado, our first lesson in making sure your company’s video isn’t the worst around.
Deinterlacing:
What is it?
Strictly defined, deinterlacing is the act of converting interlaced video into non-interlaced video. Speaking more broadly, its converting interlaced video into progressive scan video.
Why would my video be interlaced, and why should I deinterlace it?
Along with the transition from standard definition (NTSC) to high definition (ATSC) television, one of the biggest shifts in the video marketplace has been that from CRT, or tube, televisions to LCD and Plasma flat panel displays. The flat panels don’t just take up less space, but they transmit images differently.
When a tube television projects an image onto the screen, it updates every other line at 1/60 of a second intervals, thus creating a full frame at 1/30 of a second intervals. Since pretty much all monitors were tubes until recently, there’s a lot of interlaced video masters in the marketplace.
When an LCD or plasma screen creates an image, it updates the entire picture at 1/24, 1/30, or 1/60 of a second interval.
The thing is, when you’re taking an image where every other line is updated, and put it on a screen where the whole image is being updated, problems happen.
There are two main types of video errors that we frequently see as a result of interlacing issues.
Problem #1: Interlaced video on progressive displays
We see a ton of video where deinterlacing never took place, resulting in a jagged image. The thing is, there’s no excuse for this whatsoever. Notice the jaggedness that exists everywhere that there is any sort of movement.
Problem #2: Video is deinterlaced, but it still looks sketchy
We can’t really show an example of bad deinterlacing, because, frankly, whereas the first problem is easy to spot, sometimes its hard to tell if something is the victim of bad deinterlacing or just generally poor video. This is something you can witness on your own. If you’re a mac user, download the VLC player. If you’re a PC user, find a friend with a mac.
When you open up a dvd within the VLC player, you have the option of deinterlacing using a variety to different techniques, such as “blend”, “bob” and “linear”. You’ll quickly see that not all deinterlacing methods are alike, which makes sense since not all interlacing methods are alike.
Regardless of whether or not the right technique is chosen, deinterlacing interlaced video is still a basic step that most dance companies fail to take.
A few more online guides related to deinterlacing:
Tagged with: deinterlacing , tips , video , Video 101
[...] Second, Philip commented on the disorganization of the theater, and I believe this disorganization was also a contributing factor to the video clarity issues that impacted the film. The theater was clearly playing the film on a computer that was attached to the projector and unfortunately, they failed to properly set the deinterlace setting. Thus the entire film was projected with interlacing errors intact, and whomever is at fault deserves a good flogging (I previously posted about the visual impact of interlacing errors in October). [...]