Interlace convertion question

[Egen]

hi all,

i would appreciate some help on the following.

I have interlaced source video and i cant really decide if converting it to progressive when encoding has any pros?

[smok3]

that would depend on your target encode usage, say for web i would deinterlace, for dvd i would not.

[J_Darnley]

Pros: it is not interlaced, progressive encoding (with x264) is more efficient.

[Egen]

well my intention is to watch the encoded video on a tv set.:thanks:

[kemuri-_9]

depending on the TV, it can accept progressive input via HDMI, HDCP, and/or VGA/DMI interfaces,
it's just that TV's come with built-in deinterlacing algorithms for handling standard broadcasts which are usually interlaced,
but even HDTVs that take 1080i need to have such algorithms too.

Should check with your TV it if takes any of these interfaces,
and if it does i would recommend using progressive as you won't have to deal with common interlacing problems such as dot crawl and line rainbowing,
which you can deal with better by filtering on the computer when converting to progressive.

It also depends on how you're getting your media to play on the TV (i.e. Blu-ray/PS3, Xbox 360, TV output on the computer, DVD Player)

[Blue_MiSfit]

Sure.

Here's another question:

Does your content have a lot of fast motion that would benefit from the full interlaced video field rate of 59.94 for NTSC / 50 for PAL?

Sports absolutely need this, and it's nice for most content. Talking heads type stuff (news, documentaries etc) don't IMO.

I think it's easiest to encode interlaced, but it's not as simple for H.264 as it is for DVD.

So the following questions need to be answered:

1) Do I need double-rate motion fluidity?
2) Is my playback display truly interlaced?
3) If not, can it (or my player) do a good job of bob-deinterlacing (double rate)?
4) Can my player handle interlacing in the first place?

Also @ kemuri-_9:
While deinterlacing with AviSynth you do have the option to reduce dot crawl / rainbowing artifacts. However, these artifacts are not directly a result of interlacing, but rather a result of composite video being used somewhere in the post-production pipeline (which should NEVER happen, but does - all the time - sadly :()

~MiSfit

[Egen]

@Misfit...i thought that the great difference was that interlace contain more information than progressive so the result would be better in interlace if that info can be depicted in playback.

How about if i de interlace the source with the encoder but encode as field? I get a nicer visual result...(subjective)

[kemuri-_9]

the difference between progressive and interlaced is that interlaced doubles the framerate, but only sends half the picture with every frame (the fields).
so every 2 fields in this interlacing scheme has to undergo de-interlacing to generate a full progressive type frame.

interlacing in terms of quality is usually worse than progressive for most people.
whole wiki article on interlacing for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlacing

[Egen]

:thanks: