How to convert progressive to interlaced

[John Heagy]

You can simply alter the metadata in your 25p movie from progressive to interlaced using Digital Rebellion’s QuickTime Edit.

[Rafael Amador]

[Anette Olsen] “But you wrote this: “Just putting the 1080P footage into a 1080i sequence will make it output in PSF”what did you mean by that then?”
I was just repeating Andrew’s text.
What John suggest is a very good idea.
With just a click, you flag the movie as Interlaced. No reprocessing.
rafael

[Carl V. spurner]

You blokes never answered Anettes’ question and hijacked her post which was an attempt to get an answer to solve her issue.

Anette, here is a link to get crystal clear vision in interlaced format from a progressive file:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/solorio_marco/interlacing_progressive_footage.php

This will take time but a solution none the less.

A simple rule is:

Television requires – Interlaced

Film, Web, DVDs requires or works best with – progressive.

It helps to know where your product will end up before your begin your field production.

[Ht Davis]

You’re all close… …But most aren’t answering the question, only offering their own work around.

Here’s what guys who actually present playable media do…

Remembering that the biggest factor in “Motion” quality is frame rate, and the second biggest is field order, you have to think about what you are getting when you actually render out your project.

Any NLE is going to allow you to set up a Timeline that is based on Frame rate, not field order (they don’t care about field order ON THE TIMELINE ITSELF); but there is a Preview video created (a proxy file that you can size to your hearts content and format to your liking) that does worry about field order, as it will be what you see when you play back your effects. When you render out the final project, you typically want to keep the frame rate of your timeline, but occasionally you can just use your preview video if the quality is to your spec. This means you want to choose your timeline based on frames, but choose your preview based on your output spec so you can get an idea of what your product will look like.

For 60p source–>start with 60i preview, at full Frame Size (1080). If you have to output a disc, You may want to leave it at 60p, but use 720p target for preview. You could, at the end, nest your final in another timeline, same frame setting for the timeline, but set the preview to 30i with full size and see if that still suits you. If so, go with it.

For 30p Source–>stick to 30p output for online or computer based playback. You can squeeze this into blu-ray with x264 plugin or handbrake and freex264 (FFMPEG)… …But you are best off using 30i transcode for 1080 preview, and then set up a new timeline with a 720p preview, and see which you like the best across all screens (Put a compressed preview or transcode onto usb and playback on tv).

For 24p, remember not to move around too much, and you should be able to go right to 1080p blu-ray, or full frame youtube, but you will lose more quality at that sizing. You may want to shift to 720p target, if for no other reason than that you want to use less data rate while keeping fine edge quality. Scaling up from that is easier to do at the screen than on the server where it is stored.

I like to use uncompressed for source, and occasionally proxy, as playback on a computer looks better. Rendering out several work areas and playing through to see my work is the only way I’ve been able to get it done with a macbook pro 2.16ghz core2duo and an older geforce 8600m with 256mb vram and 4gb ddr2.

side note:
If you do any slo-mo, you really want a camera where the frame rate is really high, like 60p, but you want to be able to cut it down to 24p. This is called a pulldown. Since 60 and 24 both have several common factors (1,2,3,4,6), the frames can be reprocessed to 24p with better results than with 60 to 30 ( 1,2,3,5,10). The first 4 factors are perfectly inline, and only 1 apart, where with 30, there are only 3 1 apart factors. Rendering to a slower rate yields that, for a number of frames, there is a number of sections, and those sections must have so many frames. Divide 60 by 4, you get 15, divide 24 by 4 you get 6. At this point, it may look mismatched. But take a closer look… …In the end you get this: for every 5 frames at 60fps, there are 2 at 24fps. This would typically drop 3 of the frames. If you know where to drop these 3 frames, you can, effectively, slow the motion, and recode it to 60 frames by simply reconstitution of the motion from those dropped frames, or by stretching the time it takes to play 5 frames, so that only 2 frames are played. That’s 40% speed! Less than half-speed, so just over double the time. 60fps becomes 60frames every 2.4seconds, or 24fps. By stretching the frames over more time, you can reinterpolate the motion and slow it down. Put a 60fps, slow it to 24 and then render the section to a 60fps preview. You’ll see it in a 60p\i container, but the bits that define what is actually playing should show the drop in frame rate. This will still output just fine from any encoder, to any container with a 60frame.