Deartifacter for Premiere Pro
Deartifacting is where we cancel out some of the subtle imperfections in digital video that can become big problems when shown on the big screen. If you are lucky enough to shoot your footage in a 4:4:4 format, then you can skip this step, otherwise you should consider using the plugin whenever you are using compressed media and want to create a higher quality master in an intermediate format like uncompressed or a frame sequence.
There are four options in the menu for setting the content type of your source. The Deartifacting Menu defaults to None. This is because the plug-in can’t reliably guess which of the settings you should use. But you should most likely use one of the three options, so read on.
Select the Deartifacting option that matches your source footage type.
Deartifacting addresses the fact that color, an afterthought in video to begin with, still gets second-class treatment in modern digital video sources—whether they be consumer miniDV, HDV or professional HDCAM. You may be familiar with the method of identifying digital video color resolution as 4:1:1 or 4:2:0, or 4:2:2, or even 4:4:4. These are descriptions of the proportion of information in the Luminance (Y) channel (the first number) with the color (U & V or I & Q) channels (the second two). What this means practically is that in 4:1:1 video (miniDV and DVCAM among others) there is only one pixel of color information for every four pixels of luminance information! This means in your NTSC video source at 720 pixels wide by 480 tall, your color information is actually only 180 by 120 pixels!
How is this even OK? The human eye tends to perceive detail most predominantly in the luminance information, so that’s where compressed formats such as DV and HDCAM concentrate most of their efforts. These systems work hard to put as much information as possible into the smallest space they can—allowing such miracles as copying digital video signals right off a tape to your inexpensive hard drive through a 1/8th-inch thick cable. Compressing data so that upright apes don’t notice much is called perceptual compression, and it’s a good thing most of the time.
But in some tricky cases, such as when one bright color is right next to another, contrasting one, you can definitely see artifacts of this compression technique—especially with 4:1:1 footage. Never fear—Deartifacter to the rescue!
DVCAM, miniDV and Digital S are 4:1:1 formats. For these types of source video, select the 4:1:1 option in the Deartifacting Menu. For Digital Betacam, D1, DVCPRO50, DVCPROHD and other 4:2:2 formats, select the 4:2:2 option. For HDCAM footage and other 3:1:1 formats, select the 3:1:1 option.
Original DV Footage (Left), Deinterlaced (Center), Deinterlaced and Deartifacted (Right)