Canon C100 Mark II - Fixing the AVCHD Aliasing Artifacts
I’ve had some time now to film with and test the C100 MarkII’s performance during my video shoots and have been quite happy with the results in the edit suite. It produces great images, and it’s a beast when filming for longer periods of time such as when I film presentations and conferences for clients here in Austria.
The camera can shoot in both MP4 and AVCHD formats. Most of the time I tend to film MP4 since it gives me a relatively smaller file size to work with while editing and I don’t really see a difference in image quality compared to AVCHD.
The exception is when recording in-camera audio for my video production projects such as during interviews, conferences, presentations, or any dialogue scene. In these cases, filming in AVCHD is the way to go since it records Linear PCM and gives me flexibility during the edit to better tweak my audio (MP4 records digital compressed audio).
Interview Set Up With the C100 Mark II
That’s all great, however for some reason Canon’s AVCHD codec is a slightly peculiar variety of this norm. While editing the video footage one can notice small artifacts on certain edges and around detailed areas when editing in Premiere Pro.
AVCHD footage at 100%
When zooming in at 400%, one can see the strange interlaced-looking footage that comes straight from the camera.
Luckily I was neither the first nor the only videographer or cameraman to notice this. There’s a great article by Matt Davis where he explains how to fix this issue in Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X. You can read his great article and all the intricacies and details about the issue HERE.
Basically a few steps have to be taken before the edit, and it’s pretty straightforward. After importing your footage into Premiere Pro, control-click them all, select “modify” from the pop-up menu, then choose “Interpret Footage”.
In the Modify Clip box, click “Conform to” in the Field Order section and select “No Fields (Progressive Scan)”.
Your video footage should now be showing correctly while viewing at full resolution and those ugly aliasing artifacts should be gone.
Image at 400%
Another Solution:
A good solution I found for this issue is filming with my Atomos Ninja Star external recorder. By doing it this way, the videographer and/or editor doesn't have to worry about interpreting the footage in the edit suite.
Before video shooting begins on set, I make sure pulldown removal is switched on by holding the “next” button for two seconds (“i→P” option). This changes the conversion to a 2:2 pulldown (it’s important to note that this example is when the cameraman or videographer is shooting at 25fps).
Using this method you no longer have to go through the process of interpreting anything in the editing room since the video footage should be showing correctly and without any artifacts straight out of the card connected to the external recorder.
Posted by: Vitor Goncalves
Vitor is a filmmaker, cameraman and editor based in Vienna, Austria. He is the owner of Reel Arts Media.
