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DE-INTERLACING IN AFTER EFFECTS

METHOD 5: THE REELSMART FIELDSKIT

And now there's RE:Vision Effects ReelSmart FieldsKit, which claims to "Ödeinterlace video imagery with superior results. Using proprietary field contruction and adaptive motion techniques, ReelSmart Deinterlacer can bui;d full frames from fields that are of much higher quality than the standard approaches available in most effects and video editing applications."

Actually the FieldsKit contains a set of 3 plug-ins: the ReelSmart Deinterlacer, the ReelSmart Reinterlacer and the ReelSmart Pulldown. But at this point we're most curious about the promised results of the de-interlacer.

Since most applications tend to just throw away one field when de-interlacing, the FieldKit wins hands down in most comparisons. I compared the results of the ReelSmart Deinterlacer to the other methods I described in this article. In some cases the ReelSmart Deinterlacer was an easy winner, but on most footage I couldn't see much difference between the ReelSmart Deinterlacer and the built-in After Effects approach as described in Method 4.

But…

While After Effects is supposed to detect motion and only de-interlace the moving areas of the image, it's not a controllable process, and doesn't respond well to some kinds of footage. This is where the FieldsKit became my best friend. It contains a sophisticated and highly adjustable 'motion mask' section. This lets the user set values for the kind of motion that is detected (point difference, small area or larger area), for motion tolerance, mask suppression, mask grow, and other parameters, that let you decide exactly which part of the image will be de-interlaced, and which parts will be left untouched. And this is the part where I feel that the ReelSmart FieldsKit has the potential to improve quality compared to the other approaches. The FieldsKit offers elaborate control over the process, without being complex to handle. And all related parameters like the switch for upper or lower field dominance are right there.

ORIGINAL FIELDS	FIELDSKIT	FIELDSKIT WITH MOTIONMASK
ORIGINAL FIELDS	ROLL-OVER TO SEE ORIGINAL

The most right images shows that the moving parts of the image are de-interlaced, and quite well actually, but the static parts of the image are left untouched, and all image detail remains.

The motionmask works best on clean and steady shots. If there's a lot of cameramovement in the shot you'd probably be best off de-interlacing the entire image. You also don't want to set the mask too tight around moving objects, make sure you also include the moving shadows.

METHOD 1: PS-Deinterlace
METHOD 2: Blending the fields
METHOD 3: Nudge the footage
METHOD 4: The After Effects way
METHOD 5: ReelSmart FieldsKit

Summary