Should I deinterlace or not ?

[TheJez]

I capture VHS tapes through the anlog input of my video card with VD(with sync mod to get correct A/V synchronisity), using a DV encoder. Next step is encoding to MPEG2 and author it to DVD. The captured AVI's are interlaced. I wonder if there is a reason to deinterlace the AVI before further processing or not ? So far it turns out perfectly, as long as I set the right Field Order when I encode to MPEG2. But maybe I'm overlooking something.

Thanks,

The Jez

<edit> Sorry, I just seem to have broken rule #1. Therefor I apologise. I am quite new to this formum, so I hope for some forgiveness.

[mf]

You should encode your intermediate AVI files (if any) in a format that supports interlacing (like huffyuv RGB or VBLE through AVISynth interlaced YV12 processing). MPEG-2 supports an interlace flag (just like MPEG-4, hence XviD has a setting for it too, by the way), so you're fine as long as you set that (don't know what you use to author your DVDs, so I don't know where you could find that setting). If you're planning to watch your DVDs on PC only, you might find that AVISynth deinterlacing filters might be better at deinterlacing than your software DVD player, but that's a personal preference.