Magic Bullet Frames In Final Cut Pro
The Frames plug-in is a fast-rendering tool that offers deinterlacing, which converts interlaced-source media to progressive frames. Frames also offers 24p conversion that creates progressive frames from an interlaced source and converts the frame rate to match the film frame rate of 23.976 frames per second. The deinterlacing mode works for both NTSC or PAL sources and for HD interlaced sources like 1080i. The plugin provides two modes for deinterlacing: field-blend and motion-adaptive, and offers additional controls for cropping (letterbox) and the shifting of the frame for adjusting the scan area when cropping is turned on. In addition, there is a built-in Field Smoothing control which does a vertical smooth of up one scan line or pixel row to help reduce field flicker or remove any leftover combing artifacts (the alternating horizontal lines that shows field-based motion) that Frames might have missed.
The Frames plugin in Final Cut Pro
The Frames plug-in offers six controls for optimizing the output.
Mode is where you choose the type of conversion for your project, either Deinterlace-only or 24p Deinterlace. These two modes produce distinctly different output. The Deinterlace Only mode is meant to generate progressive images from an interlaced source.
An Interlaced frame (left/top) and the Frames output (right/bottom) showing the progressive result
The 24p Deinterlace does three distinct operations: deinterlacing the source, converting the frame rate from 60i to 24p, and finally, adding 3:2 pulldown to the 24p source to maintain the same number of frames in the timeline. So, now you are thinking, how does that work?
Here is a breakdown of the steps. Deinterlacing works just like the mode above, where it combines fields in a smart way to produce a progressive frame. However, instead of doing this for every frame in the source, the plug-in drops every fifth frame of information and produces 4 output frames for every 10 fields of input. So, 60 fields become 24 frames, producing a 24p frame rate. Finally, to maintain the same number of fields in the output as the original, an extra field is generated from every third and fourth frame and inserted into the output, so 24 frames become 60 fields again but some fields are duplicated to make up for the missing frame. Because of this 3:2 pulldown step, you will still see fields in the canvas window if you step through your media with the right and left arrows.
The same frame simply deinterlaced (left/top) and the same frame in 24p mode with duplicated fields
The whole point of the 24p conversion is to give your NTSC or 1080i60 source the look of film while maintaining the same frame rate as the original. The result looks just like it would if you had shot of 24p film and then added pulldown for play out on an NTSC televsion. The motion has more judder and feels like film when it is played back.
Conversion
The Frames plug-in's main controls are under the Conversion group. There are three controls: Input Field Order, Field Interpolation and Field Smooth.
Input Field Order where you choose the field order for your source. Frames must be set to the correct field order or the results will be incorrect when you render.
Field Interpolate lets you set the interpolation mode for the output of the frames. Motion (the default) detects motion in the frames and interpolates areas of motion, while areas of no or little motion simply use the opposite field to yield a sharper frame. The other mode is Blend, which simply blends the two fields together. This is quickest method of conversion, but can result in ghosting for fast-moving objects in the frame.
Field smooth smoothes the output fields to avoid twitter or field-based strobing. A value of 0 (the default) does no smoothing, while a value of 100 will smooth two fields 100% percent. To maintain sharpness, use a value between 25 and 50 for the best results.
The Frames tool delivers good results in the Motion mode. This mode can be used for a variety of different source types. Below is a crop of car in motion processed with Frames, setting the Interpolation to Motion and the Field Smooth setting to 25.
Processing with Frames with no processing (left) and Motion processing (right).
Crop
The Cropping controls offer integrated letterboxing modes. You can choose from popular presets in the menu, with thin letterboxing that mimics Super 16 frames aspect ratios of 1.66:1 to standard 16:9 widescreen mode to Ultra-wide 2.76:1 cropping to give your footage the 65mm ultra-widescreen look.
If you choose a crop mode, you may want to shift the frame up or down in the frame to re-center a subject or avoid cropping a head or other object in a scene. The Shift control simply moves the image up or down by whole-pixel values of up to 200 pixels in either direction.
NOTE: In Final Cut Pro 5.1.4, the current release does not work properly and simply generates black frames instead of real output. We only recommend Final Cut Pro 6.0x for Frames 1.0.