What’s the Magic Bullet Frames Plus Filter Doing?
At this point you’re probably anxious to see what all the fuss is about—what exactly is Frames Plus doing to your footage that no other software can do? Frames Plus deinterlaces video by examining it for the type of interlacing artifacts that are easy to spot by eye, but hard to isolate for a computer algorithm. To do this it uses a fuzzy-logic approach that accounts for pixels that may move a whole frame or a half a frame, potentially skipping fields as they go. Frames Plus then examines those areas of motion and creates new pixels where the secondary field must be discarded. The creation of new pixels is based on pattern matching, so that instead of a simple interpolation, you actually get smooth contours and clean diagonals. This technique of deinterlacing is the exact same award-winning technology that The Orphanage has used on original productions in years past.
Frames Plus deinterlacing
To see it work, you must switch the video layer to which you have applied the Frames Plus effect to Best Quality mode (Layer > Quality > Best, or press the short cut command+u [control-u], or with the toggle switch in the Timeline). In Draft Quality, Frames Plus is saving you time by doing a very simple, fast deinterlacing. You can work quickly in this mode, and know that when you go to batch render your final piece you can automatically switch your layers to Best mode in your Render Settings.
The following images show a blow-up of Frames Plus versus After Effects' built-in deinterlacing set using the Preserve Edges switch in the Interpret Footage dialog.
This shows the Frames Plus (left/top) output versus the After Effects output (right/bottom). Note the smooth lines on the meter on the left.
The best way to evaluate how well Frames Plus is working is in motion, so maybe take this opportunity to run off a quick RAM preview and try it out.
It’s interesting to note that Frames Plus only works where it has to, using the Motion Detection information as a guide. This means that the rendering speed varies according to how much motion is in the frame. Frames Plus will expend a lot less effort converting a talking head or a mostly-static establishing shot than it will a crazy action shot. It’s nice to know that your software isn’t wasting time, isn’t it?
Troubleshooting
Is the Frames Plus process perfect? No. It can screw up just like any experimental robot developed by the government and mistakenly set loose in a small town. ;-) We have skipped over two sliders that you can use if you catch the plugin producing less-than-spectacular results. We’re hoping you never have to touch these sliders, but in case you do, here’s the scoop.
Motion Detection Adjustment isn’t the most exciting-sounding slider in the world, but it’s an important control for helping isolate motion. Adjust it if you see a large difference between what the plug-in shows in Draft mode and Best mode—a clue that the plug-in isn’t seeing all the motion in the frame, which can be the case in dark or heavily artifacted areas of the frame. If this is the case, set this value a bit higher. You may also need to do this on the frame right before a cut if you see “splotchy” areas in your image.
Detail Pattern Size is where you help the plug-in out when it’s struggling to recreate the missing information in a motion area. This can happen in repeating patterns that tend to look bad on video anyway, such as striped shirts or knit sweaters. It can also happen in very busy areas of the frame, such as leaves on distant trees, or brick patterns on buildings. Repeating patterns like these can confuse the Frames Plus process and cause it to leave little horizontal artifacts in your image. Reducing the Detail Pattern Size to a value of 2 can eliminate this, but it will also tone down the ability to reconnect diagonal lines, so you may lose smoothness on contours in the image.
In the rare cases that you find yourself adjusting these settings, you will want to keyframe the values of these sliders. By placing Hold keyframes on cut points in your program, you can customize the settings for a particularly problematic shot and then return to the defaults for the remainder of your project.
Deartifacting in Frames Plus
We have now only explored half of what Frames Plus can do to improve the look of your footage. The next section, Deartifacting, is where we remove some of the subtle imperfections in digital video that can become big problems when shown on the big screen.
The Deartifacting Menu defaults to None. This is because Frames Plus 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.
Original DV Footage (Left), Deinterlaced (Center), Deinterlaced and Deartifacted (Right)
Frames Plus' 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 or professional HDCAM. You may be familiar with the method of identifying digital video color resolution as 4:1:1, 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—Frames Plus 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.
Select the Deartifacting option that matches your source footage type.
When should I not use the Deartifacting options? Only when time is a factor in your output. If your footage is 4:4:4, and has been brought online using a method that maintains this, then you can leave Deartifacting set to None. Or leave it off if you’re in a hurry and this fine level of quality is not important (which can be the case if you are outputting to a 4:1:1 format such as DV), since the Deartifacting process does increase render times by a large amount.
Why is Frames Plus a 16bits per channel effect? Frames Plus works on source footage that is almost always 8bpc. Even though it does not perform any color correction itself, the latest versions support the vast color space of 16bpc to preserve the full 10 bits of data in an uncompressed video file. All of the other plug-ins in Magic Bullet Frames Plus package (except Deartifacter) are fully 16bpc-optimized as well.
What’s the purpose of the Draft mode Frames Plus? With your layer in Draft mode, Frames Plus renders an accurate preview of what your deinterlaced frame will look like, but skips over the more time-consuming, high-quality deinterlacing procedure. Aside from providing fast feedback when working interactively in After Effects, this feature can also be handy at render time. If you want to quickly write out a QuickTime movie to check your color correction, Looks, and other effects, leaving the plug-in in Draft mode (by selecting the Current Settings Render Settings preset) can greatly speed things up.