optimized media for moire

I recently bought a Canon C100 and noticed that some exterior shots had a fair bit of moire in fcpx when I brought them in. Then I optimized the files and it cleaned right up. I read somewhere that setting the timeline in fcpx to progressive does the same thing, I'm not sure what that means. I can't find that setting anywhere. I'd rather not have to optimize a lot of my media as it takes up so much disk space. It also makes me wonder if it's a good idea to optimize everything for the final master. What do you think? thx

I think we need to keep 'Moire' and 'Aliasing' apart.

As a fellow C100 & FCPX user, I'm pretty sure you're talking about Aliasing - nasty stair-stepping or a general look of 'low resolution'.

This is caused by Canon's use of 'Progressive Segmented Frame' or 'PSF' to put 'progressive' style footage in an interlaced format for 'compatibility'. Canon's not got the best record of doing this in a widely accepted way:

provideocoalition.com/atepper/story/psf8...ersus_malignant_psf/

However, the bottom line is that your C100 footage really is beautiful and devoid of almost all aliasing (there will always be some), but you'll need to check that you're putting footage into a Progressive Project/Timeline and that all your footage is marked as Progressive in the 'Field Dominance Override' section of the Settings View of the Inspector.

Moire is slightly different, and in video this tends to look like a green/magenta discolouration around areas of parallel lines. I've not experienced that yet.

The optimisation process, at some point, recognises the original footage as being progressive and correctly flags it as such so you don't see any 'de-interlacing of non-interlaced material'.

Because I've got a relatively quick and up-to-date Mac, and I work of SSD (therein lies a story), I don't need to transcode rushes to ProRes to edit. Last week, I was sharing C100 on-site with a colleague who was using an older MBP, He definitely needed to import and generate proxies, as the recent move to push more work onto the GPU hit his MacBook Pro's lesser graphics card where most of us experienced a speed INCREASE.

Thanks. I was wondering how to do that. I can see how to make the clips in my browser Progressive in the Field Dominance Override, but is there a way to have the timeline itself progressive in the same sense? Then I wouldn't have to manually alter the clips in the browser. Is PSF at all related to PF24? I've set the camera simply to 24P. thx

Well, you have to set up the Project/Timeline as progressive from the Get-Go (could be wrong, but I always set them up manually). So... "+" for a new Project and select 'Custom' then your format (so not 1080i), resolution and frame rate.

Then it's 'select a clip, Shift-F to reveal in Browser, clickety-click in Inspector', or a humgous 'select all' in the Event Browser (which is what I did this morning with 1578 clips).

I am going to tip-toe away from the 24PSF vs 24P question thing as then we get into big debates about pulldown in a 60i wrapper, and I don't like to think about such things without a nice bottle of something on hand to help. Roughly speaking, I'd guess 24PSF is 24p into a 60i wrapper with pull down needed, and 24p is (probably) official 23.97 non-pulldown pure progressive. The former being required for backward compatibiliy. I think. Could be wrong. Probably am. Where's that bottle something?

My timelines are all set to 1080P so it is just the clips that need to be switched to Progressive. Not too clear on the underlying reasons for all this, but it doesn't matter. I'll open a bottle either way. thx

FCPX could learn about the strange and alien flags that get waved by Canon cameras, or Canon could try adopting standards like Sony, Panasonic and JVC. Sorry, my bad, ranting.

At least we have a workaround that doesn't include rubber chickens.

Although rubber chickens are always entertaining. thx again.