Deinterlace/IVTC/Keep Interlaced

[mordant]

I've been trying to do some backups of TV show DVDs in SVCD format. I wanted to know if anyone has already done a backup of NTSC version of the Young Ones. The episodes are full screen NTSC 29.97 Interlaced and about 35 minutes each. I have been about to encode them using TMPGenc at 352x480 keeping them interlaced, but even at Max bitrate of 2520 and with Temporal Smoother there doesn't seem to be enough bitrate to keep noise out of action scenes (I'm guessing its because I've tried to keep them interlaced).

I've never been able to get a handle on the IVTC idea. I was hoping someone who had converted these or similar material could let me know if IVTC is the answer, of if I'm best off de-interlacing and some suggestions for the de-interlace filter and settings.

[wongck5]

IVTC is definitely not the answer since your source is truely interlaced.
Keep interlaced will give better smoothness of the movie but require higher bitrate. Noise removal is more complicated.
Deinterlace the movie will give higher picture quality at lower bitrate but sacrifice the movie smoothness. (29.97 fps rather than 59.94 fields/sec)

If you still want to keep the movie interlaced (esp if you want the SVCD to be displayed on TV), refer to the following thread for noise removal of interlaced material.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33007&highlight=noise
The quality will be better at lower bitrate if noise removal is optimized before encoding.

[mordant]

Thanks, that gave me some things to think about.