Magic Bullet Frames

The Frames plug-in is a fast-rendering alternative to the Frames Plus tool. It provides output that is similar to After Effects' built-in deinterlacing, but 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.

Frames UI
The Frames interface in After Effects

The Frames plug-in offers six controls for optimizing the output.

Conversion

The Frames plug-ins main controls are under the Conversion group. There are three controls: Input Field Order, Field Interpolation and Field Smooth settings.

Input Field Order where you choose the field order for your source. Frames will automatically set this control based on After Effects' interpretation and then set the Interpret Setting to None.

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 both fields 100% percent. To maintain sharpness, use a value between 25 and 50 for the best results.

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 you 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.

Expected 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.

Frames Before Frames After
Processing with Frames with no processing (left) and Motion processing (right).