Aliasing with External Recorder?

Anyone else finding problems with using an external recorder and moire'/aliasing?

I'm currently using a Sound Devices PIX220 and a Sony HVR-V1U.

I want to test with the Z5U if I ever get it back (you picky folk should think twice about the Sagemax insurance and Lifetime Services....I haven't had the use of my Z5 since I sent it in (*3 times now) since late February!!!)

Might be a camera/recorder relationship issue.

Same artifacts NOT showing up with straight HDV recording.

These are not "little" issues....they are very distracting, and make otherwise great clips unusable. So you won't see those ones. A shame to lose shots to a technical BS problem!

On shots that don't have repeating patterns, horizontals/curves, leaves, etc, the PIX recorder does yield more detail and the color depth is tons better.

But on shots of, say, a pan to a glacier, or the grill of a truck, or the ridgeline of a rooftop, the weirs movement totally blows the shot.

This is not evident when making the shot using viewfinder and/or the monitor on the PIX screen.

Does not matter what codec/bit rate I select.

I shoot frequently on tape and the PIX at the same time, for backup and for comparison. Not often enough though, so much of four days of shooting just went down the drain!

Any input would be appreciated!

Well, I will say this. There is no getting back lost time.

I'm afraid that just isn't very helpful though, and I do feel for ya brother.

Well thanks for the sentiment.... it is a depressing situation....not so much the time, but the fact that much of it was unique footage, hard to replicate. Of course, some of it sucked, so I have a chance to do it right if I go back to those places.... not such a bad thing in and of itself, but Exit Glacier is a depressing place even on a nice day, and I've NEVER seen Seward or the Seward Highway in the sun before!

Get a new cable. Sounds like connector corrosion.

It's the same regardless of the cable. Of course, it's an older camera, so it could be that connector. Can't change that connector, (it LOOKS good anyway....but how to tell) and the connector on the PIX is as old as the PIX, which is about 6 months.

I ran into a clue regarding this problem. I am a total After Effects newbie, and therefore suspect- I'm running CS6 trial, and I imported a bit of HDV footage into it, a moose angrily splashing its hoof down, that was shot and captured using tape. Since the resolution of HDV is 1440x1080, and I output at 1920x1080, I made the composition settings as full HD. Don't ask me where the extra resolution comes from. But it seems to be there and aspect ratio issues are not an issue.

So....I edit the clip....in this case slowing it down and messing with color a bit. When I rendered it, (to Quicktime/PJPEG) I noticed that the hairs on the moose's back displayed that weird rippling problem....very very similar to the problem I see when recording via HDMI to the PIX. I stripped the FX time expansion and ran the file in AE, and the problem is still there. I re-imported the footage, and even when AE auto-sets it up as a 1440x1080 HDV composition, the rippling is still there (interesting to note that the aspect ratio is all messed up in this case)

All the settings I know of in AE are correct. Anything I change makes it look funny, but all settings still have the rippling effect.

Note that importing this same HDV footage into Vegas and modifying it in the same way (project settings 1920x1080, 30p, rendered QT.mov/PJPEG, 1920x1080) the rippling is not there at all!

Importing THAT rendered footage into Ater Effects does NOT exhibit the problem at all.

The problem is something I can deal with on working with HDV originated files in AE......make an intermediate working file via Vegas first.

However, I suspect that the problem with recording to the PIX is related, but a certain distinction has to be made.

First of all, the signal via HDMI is direct from the processing of the camera's sensors.....there IS processing, but it is before HDV compression. This signal is (according to the camera's specs) an "uncompressed 4:2:2 8-bit" at 1920x1080 - the resolution of the sensors. In my case, since I record in 30fps progressive, it is 30p over 1080i carrier.

With importing HDV into After Effects, there is a resolution difference....so one might expect a difficulty if there isn't all the proper settings...or it could be some funky issue with AE....Adobe isn't well known for being friendly to non-native codecs as far as I can tell based on reading AE and Premiere forums...a lot of that info is dated, so who knows how valid in this situation.

The PIX is EXPECTING the same signal I am giving it. So what is the problem here? Should I go back to the "workaround" which addresses an issue I cannot seem to get an answer about?

Also.....the "rippling" at the top of the frame (only evident with straight lines) may be in the overscan area....but that is not a legit reason for it to be OK. This is the age of the internet, and overscan is a thing of the past, or at least it is when someone is watching your file rendered out to 720p half screen....they see ALL of it.

Something fishy going on here....may be multi-faceted. I would very much appreciate input/help!

This directly from the Sound Devices website:

Horizontal artifacts when scaling 1080PsF to 1080p. Workaround: Set to 'same as video input' and record as PsF or Set camera output to 1080i59.94 with 3:2 pulldown and set scaler to 1080p23.98 with 3:2pd detected.

Could be the trial. I have had problems with Adobe product trials before that the full versions didnt have. After you bought and ran updates, it could be gone. Would not want to be resposible if it didn't work though :-)

I hear you. I'm going on several week-long trips starting next week, so I'm not going to start my subscription until after that. In the meantime, I'm wasting valuable time (again) trying to ascertain just what the hell is going on here. Gonna post a couple comparison clips in the Artists forum. Then I will finish this ultra-boring comparison test video, render and upload, to be posted here. I might have actually found the answer, but it's not the answer I wanted. It involves interlacing, and maybe the PIX isn't not doing it right (I shoot progressive), but it's carried over a 1080i signal with PsF. So far it looks like the only acceptable way of doing this is to shoot progressive, interpret the footage as 1080 PsF 30, which, as I understand "prgressive segmented frames" is basically an interlaced system, and with fast motion, which happens when you shoot wildlife, combing can occur in unpleasant places.....still working...I'll bore you all more later.

OK---here is an extreme example (first clip, short), I removed the video of the tests, as further inspection revealed that the Youtube compression totally destroyed the fidelity of it.

Anyway, I think I determined the best way to operate until the issue gets fixed for real with a firmware update.



Short Boat Gunwale Clip