Deinterlacing with Topaz Enhance in After Effects

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Transcript of video

Hi, this is Eric from Topaz Labs. In this tutorial we’ll walk through a simple, fast, and very effective way to deinterlace videos.

We will use Topaz Enhance’s Deinterlace filter with Adobe After Effects CS3 on Windows to deinterlace a difficult interlaced clip. This clip has lots of motions and lines which makes it very difficult for conventional deinterlacers to achieve acceptable results. In order to follow along you’ll need bicycle.avi, which is downloadable from this page. You will also need Topaz Enhance version 2.2, available at our website topazlabs.com, and After Effects, although you can still follow along with Premiere and Final Cut Pro as well. Although Topaz Enhance contains two filters that can deinterlace videos, we will be using the dedicated Deinterlace filter rather than the Enlarge filter in this tutorial.

First let’s open up the video itself and examine it. We see that if we play the video and look at the edges, the interlacing jagged line effect is quite apparent. If we open up the Information dialog box, then we’ll see that this clip is 30i, or 30 interlaced frames per second. What we want to do is change this to 30p, or 30 progressive frames per second. From there we have many other options, including changing it to 60 progressive frames per second and keeping the same file size, or applying slow-motion effects, or applying other Topaz Enhance filters to improve the quality of the video. We always highly recommend that you deinterlace your video first in order for other Topaz Enhance filters to achieve their fullest potential.

Now let’s open up After Effects. First, before we do anything, we’ll go ahead and set the video quality to “High” by clicking this line here in the Timeline panel until it turns solid. Every time you use Topaz Enhance, make sure that this is set correctly. Also, whenever using Topaz Enhance in After Effects, remember that if the filter you’re trying to use has an asterisk at the end of the name, like these, then that means it’s a multi-frame filter and must be the effect on top in a composition. In order to use more than one of these filters, you’ll have to nest compositions, which will be discussed in a later video.

For now, import bicycle.avi by double clicking on an empty space in the Project panel. Now we drag the bicycle footage to your composition window and After Effects automatically creates a new composition for us. From here go to Effects, Topaz Enhance, and Deinterlace, and drag it to your footage. A little box will pop up telling you that the filter automatically changed the native After Effects deinterlacing functions off, which is what we want. Just don’t change it back.

Now in the Effects Controls we can see the Deinterlace filter. The only required parameter is the Field Order parameter, which must be set correctly in order for the filter to work correctly. This video clip happens to be lower field first, but others may be different. If you don’t know how to tell, just choose one and then the other and see which one looks better in the resulting video.
So now we have a nice 30 frames per second progressive footage that looks great. From here you can do a number of things, for example, make the motion twice as smooth by doubling the frame rate to 60 progressive. Let’s just do that real quick.

All we have to do is hit Composition Settings up here and change the frames per second to 60 instead of 30. Press OK, and now you have a much smoother video with twice as many frames. The kicker is that, when compressed, both videos will be almost the exact same file size, which is great news for producing smooth, high-quality internet videos. You can even check this for yourself by rendering out this clip in 30 frames per second with MPEG-4 compression, and then rendering it in 60 frames per second and checking both of the file sizes.

From here we’ll render it out, and there you have it: an extremely high-quality 60 fps progressive clip from a difficult 30 fps interlaced clip in less than 5 minutes.

The result that you see is due to Topaz Enhance’s unique approach to deinterlacing. Unlike any other technique, the Deinterlace filter in Topaz Enhance analyzes motion vectors and information in multiple frames to fill in missing fields in a video. Essentially Topaz Enhance takes all the information present in a period of time and puts it into a frame, which creates a much better result because there is so much more information to work with. Because of this it is beyond comparison with native After Effects, Premiere, and even Final Cut Pro deinterlacers, and consistently outperforms other third-party deinterlacers as well.

Thanks for watching! For more video tutorials and other information, please visit our website at topazlabs.com. As always, if you ever have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to contact us at support[at]topazlabs.com or call us at 972-383-1588.

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