WME9 Deinterlacing Setting

[Achilles_wf]

OK, I'm encoding some home movies from DV-AVI files. I thought I had a pretty good idea of the settings I was going to use, but then I remembered that somewhere I read we should NOT use de-interlacing because it was a serious quality degradation.

I'm not sure why this would be. When I did some tests, the de-interlaced video looked fine. Now, this was when I looked at it on my PC. I haven't looked at the video on a TV yet. Is that where I would notice problems? Also, if in the future my TV's are all HD and progressive mode, then in that case wouldn't looking at de-interlaced video content be the same as how I see it now on my PC? In which case since I'm preserving videos for far in the future rather than to be viewed right now, de-interlacing would be a good idea?

In a nutshell, is it bad to use de-interlacing if I'm trying to preserve as much quality as possible in my .WMV9 encoded archived home movies?

Thanks!

Achilles_wf

[zambelli]

You don't have to deinterlace all. WME and WMV9 support interlaced encoding, leaving it to the decoder to do the deinterlacing if needed.

[Neo Neko]

More to the point of the original question. Deinterlacing truly interlaced material will cause signal degradation. Truly interlaced meaning 60 unique fields a second. Common low end DV cameras produce true interlaced material. Which is half resolution and double the frame rate. The frames are stored as fields and displayed two at a time. Traditional deinterlacing would cause field blending rendering the original source material unrecoverably dammaged. Technically you may or may not notice the dammage much. But there will be times and places you will notice the field blends. Such as fast action or fast pans. For such material if you want to convert to progressive without dammaging the material you would need to do something like a bob deinterlace. Which more or less turns the 2 fields per frame into 2 unique frames. This will however require a bit more resources to play back than it would interlaced. Resources CPU wise and bitrate wise. So for such material the typical best answer is to leave it as is. It makes it easier to play. Now and in the future. Progressive TV's and equipment made to output progressive will surely know how to handle 30/25Ffps interlaced material as it is pretty standard stuff. 60/50Fps material on the other hand could be different.

[Achilles_wf]

Understood. Thanks for the detailed response.