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De-Interlacing footage in Nuke

I’m doing a short talk tomorrow for the third years students. One of the things I’m going to talk about is how to de-interlace your footage inside nuke and thought mentioning it here might be useful for some people too.

Some cameras capture the image in interlaced format (such as XL2,XH A1 etc). When keying such image you will see the scan lines creating a distorted looking edge area. De-Interlacing will help improving this issue. Nuke’s built in tool for de-intterlacing is only for NTSC video. Also this gizmo has not been developed since Nuke is mostly used for Film post production where the de-interlacing is not required.

Keying a de-interlace image before(left) and after(right)

To access the DeInterlace node go to other )>All Plugins ( ) and press update;
1- Now press tab inside the work area and type in DeInterlace. Double click on this node to access its properties and press on “Copy to group” button.
2- Open a Notepad – copy the Group1 node (ctrl+C) and paste it into the opened notepad file (ctrl+V). By studying the script you can spot two Reformat nodes are converting the odd and even fields into NTSC format. We need to change this to PAL.
3- PAL’s resolution is 720×576 with the aspect ratio of 1.09 so you need to change
format “720 486 0 0 720 486 0.9 NTSC_video”
to
format “720 576 0 0 720 576 1.09 PAL_video”
in both cases.
4- Now select all the lines (ctrl+A) and copy (ctrl+C) them back to nuke. Anywhere in your work area press ctrl+v to paste the modified script. Now connect your footage to this node.

*If you are working with a HD camera then you need to change the resuoltion respectively (e.g. for HDV 1080i ;image resolution 1440×1080 – aspect ratio 1.33 as well as changing some positioning lines)

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11 thoughts

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  • Lisbeth

    Hey…thanks for this, it was really helpful but while doing it, I discovered an even easier way to do it (totally by accident) if you’re not so confident with looking at the raw scripts in a notepad. You can just hit the “s” button in nuke, which is across the toolbar of the “group 1” node to open up the gizmo, and you’ll see that there’s 2 purple “reformat” nodes inside. (nice and neat in a node tree!) If you double click those and go into their settings, you’ll see that their “output format” is automatically set to NTSC. Drop this menu down and you’ll find a bunch of alternatives, including HD 1920X1080 (which was super handy for me), 2K cinemascope, PAL settings, etc. Just choose the one your footage is in, and voila, it works! If your footage is in a wierd format or something this might not be an option though, and as you can probably tell I’m not exactly a tecchie so if you run into issues with my solution then definately ignore my advice and go with Sam’s solution!

  • Lee Common

    Hi found your advice on deinterlacing footage in Nuke very helpful, helped me create my first Gizmo. Which was nice.

  • Lee Common

    Very intersting site, especially the Hallucinating stuff, I have had simular thoughts(the horror, the horror) recently about dreams and reality, at one point I became lucid and almost woke up from reality, I had to meditate for hours to get my mind in the middle again and stop it from feeding back on it’s self, it was then that I went to the eyebrow centre, I’ve been there ever since.
    I use Softimage, After Effects, Terragen and recently NukeX.
    Check out my showreel on you tube
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKILGFFbWcQ

    Regards
    LMC

    • sam

      I’m glad to hear you like the blog – I had a look at your reel, you’ve some very interesting works – matchmoving in particular is very impressive.

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