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To deinterlace or not to deinterlace when transcoding footage?
I am confused by deinterlacing and would love an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
I have just finished editing a documentary. It was shot on a DSLR Panasonic GH3, so it’s HD 1080×1920. I am now suddenly panicking because when I first transcoded all the footage to ProRes422 (for editing in FCP7) using Mpeg Streamclip, the Deinterlace box was checked, as that is how I had been taught to do it. I recently stumbled across a forum/blog which suggested that Deinterlacing reduces the quality of the footage. I think my footage looks great, but now I am worried that it’s not as high quality as it could be, and as it is likely to be screening on big screens, I want the best for my film.
It was shot at 25fps in H.264 MOV.
Can someone enlighten me on this whole Deinterlacing mystery? I would be most grateful.
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3 Replies
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Well, Your footage was not interlaced to start.
Would the “deinterlace” option do anything to progressive footage? I’m not sure it would but don’t know for a fact.Bring in a clip raw, render it and compare.
Chris
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Interlacing technology actually comes from the old style TV (standard definition) where the bandwidth was very limited (think copper wire) that basically split each frame into 2 data packets (one containing all the odd “fields” and the second all the even fields) – there were other reasons too that you can learn more about here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video
There are still cameras that shoot 1080i (i for interlaced as opposed to 1080p for progressive, get it?) but most now days shoot what are called progressive frames. Your camera shoots progressive like mine so I never check the de-interlace box. Probably won’t hurt anything since the transcoder would be looking for something thats not there but run a quick test and see for yourself if you can tell the difference.
Steve Crow
Crow Digital Media
http://www.CrowDigitalMedia.com -
I did some tests with resolution charts and found that ClipWrap does a better job of converting 1080 25psf files from a Lumix GH2 into ProRes 422 than the FCP7 Log and Transfer.
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