Nikon D-90 De-Stepping now for After Effects

We have transferred the method to de-step the Nikon D90 footage to After Effects. Could be useful for us and will be useful for many other people.
It is in a project form. Just replace the footage, trim the composition and always render with current settings for render quality.
No way for now for batch processing, but for a single footage should work fine.
You can download it from here.
http://rapidshare.com/files/419394250/DESTEPPERAFXV01.rar.html

Goodbye Nikon, Hello Canon!

Well, we are finally tired of waiting.. The film is no longer shot with the D90. Tired of overpriced bodies and no manual iso control.. We switched to Canon 550d, at full 1080p24.
First tests are encouraging, since the footage has enough latitude for color correction and the extra pixels make a lot of difference (as well as the increased badwidth).
Cons: Well, the colors. with the Nikon it was a pleasure to watch the footage with no cc.
It has a film-like quality as stated by famous DoP's in the Zacuto DSLR shootout..
Also the Canons perform a lot better with Nikon Lenses (less moire, more filmy diffusion )
Shooting resumes in September full force. Stay tuned.

Nikon D90 Breakthrough! Part III - The solution by us

As soon as we discovered that the other methods for destepping were wrong. All we had to do was compare the two methods, find where they had the wrong splits and make a correct split template.
The theory proposed by a friend was that Nikon scales the footage using the nearest neighbor method to go from a resolution of about 800 lines to 720 lines. This was why some lines were discarded.
So all we had to do was find the exact scaling factor of Nikon's method and then reverse it so we could go from 720lines to about 800. The result would leave us with duplicate lines (because we would use the nearest neighbor method again) which would then be discarded and inerpolated.
After counting (by hand!) all the pixels and found the repetitive segments we were able to calculate the scale factor. The magic number is 1.113281 .
It was all downhill from there. And as you can see below the flow is very compact with minimal nodes. It is also very fast to render.
Of course in Fusion you can do all of this in a macro so it is as easy as adding a node to your footage.

I suppose a similar method can be used with After Effects. As long as scaling is done in draft mode and rendered as it is and NOT with best settings. If someone makes it for AFX, please let us know.

UPDATE: It seems that fusion has trouble with some of the Nikon AVIs possibly to a bug in the Nikon avi packager. You can use ffmpeg (free) with the script below to remux them in new fixed avi files. Just make a dos batch file (.bat) with a text editor like notepad and paste the code below

::-----------------------------------------------------------------
for /f %%f in ('dir *.avi /b /a:-d-s-h') do call :Convert "%%f"
echo Finished
PAUSE
goto :EOF
:Convert
echo FIxing %1
ffmpeg -i %1 -vcodec copy fix_%1
goto :EOF
::-----------------------------------------------------------------

Nikon D90 Breakthrough! Part II - The solution by others

Searching the internet for solutions to the D90 stair stepping problem, we found an After Effects project called 'D_MOVIE_FIXER' [technique created by Lee Wilson (dvxuser) project finished by Matthew Bennett].
What they had done was split the original picture using masks to horizontal lines of 8 or 9 pixels high, moving them leaving 1-pixel empty lines and then filling them by interpolation.
At first it seemed to work OK although we found that some lines on the lower part of the picture still did have problems (this was due to incorrect slicing).
We also found a nuke tool doing more or less the same job with the same technique. This one looked better but still had some problematic lines (also due to incorrect slicing). One of the problems of using this method was that we don't use Nuke and didn't plan on getting it only to fix this problem.
Another problem is batch processing. The After Effects method which is our program of choice worked using a complex series of nested comps and mask slices which was awkward and time consuming and required footage replacement for each movie file we would want to process.
Not an elegant solution
NEXT: Definitive solution using Fusion. Fast and elegant

VFX Development

Test render for a VFX scene of "At Someone Else's Expense"

Facebook fan page

We are very happy that our facebook fan page has already more than 450 fans. If by any chance you aren't already a fan click here:
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Είμαστε πολύ χαρούμενοι που ξεπεράσαμε ήδη τα 450 μέλη. Σας ευχαριστούμε για τη θερμή υποδοχή σας και ελπίζουμε να πιάσουμε τους 500 πολύ σύντομα. Θα σας κρατάμε ενήμερους για την πρόοδο της ταινίας μιας και τώρα προγραμματίζουμε τα επόμενα γυρίσματα

UPDATE: 530 fans (likes)

Nikon D90 Breakthrough! Part I - The problem

While shooting with a DSLR camera has its advantages, shooting with Nikon D90 has some major disadvantages due to the fact that Nikon doesn't seem to want people using it for professional acquisition of video.
One of the major problems we have to solve is called 'stair stepping removal' (or how Nikon can make an easy task difficult). Specifically, D90's sensor captures the image and then resizes it to an anamorphic resolution of about 1280x800. Then every 10 lines just skips one or two pixels to arrive to the desired 1280x720. This in introduces the stair step effect mainly visible on diagonal lines.
Lots of solutions have been offered, none of them satisfactory. So we had to come up with our own solution.
Next: The proposed solutions and its problems and our own definitive and FAST solution!