Export Lower or Upper field first?

[Mike Smith]

For DV and family, yes. Though Matrox is a complication: for their RTX 100 card they used a non-standard version of PAL DV with upper field first. Don’t know about their other cards, but it would probably be worth checking the documentation if you are using PAL.

It was quite reasonable of Redgum to assume anyone posting this question was likley using DV or DVCAM I think, and answer accordingly.

The most likely explanation for UFF / LFF looking the same is viewing on a non-interlaced screen e.g. a computer monitor, LCD or Plasma screen. You’d want to check the stuff on CRT before distributing ; reversed fields look horrible. Another possibility is that you may be editing only material filmed using a progressive scan setting in camera (but you’d know that and have told us, right!). A third possible – and I don’t use Quicktime a lot – there are reports that Quicktime discards fields and interlacing on playback in QT player – I don’t know if this is true, and doubt you are viewing that way if using Matrox card …

Otherwise, if it doesn’t matter / show up to you and your viewers, then it’s no problem. If you want to send stuff to others for, say, DVD playback, it might be good to be confident that your stuff meets normal standards and will play back on most setups …