[Owen Smithyman]

There are actually a lot of options when it comes to deinterlacing (you can probably find some on this site). Methods that give you a really nice result often take a little more time, but not necessarily. I personally have a very low opinion of QuickTime and Final Cut’s deinterlacing ability, so I would avoid using it if you can. It’s not quite as bad as just duplicating the fields, but it’s pretty close.

My favorite tool so far when it comes to deinterlacing is Episode Pro, using edge-detecting interpolation and the “deinterlace moving areas” option. This is one of the best methods I’ve found, especially with footage that doesn’t have much motion in it, because it looks for that “comb” effect of interlacing that you see when there’s motion, and just deinterlaces that area of the picture. Although if you’re delivering to the Internet from a 1080i timeline, you can sometimes just turn on the low-pass filter in Episode’s resizing module and leave deinterlacing out completely. I’m kind of obsessed with Episode.

If you don’t want to pay for Episode, and your final product is only a couple minutes, Compressor has some good options in its Frame Controls tab. However, be warned that it’s really easy to increase your encoding time from 1 hr to 80 hours when using Frame Controls, whereas Episode doesn’t have that issue.

And if you have tons of money to burn, get a Digital Rapids card, which has the most gorgeous and flawless deinterlacing I’ve ever seen, and it does it in realtime and never creates artifacts.

Owen Smithyman
BARS+TONE

[Owen Smithyman]

Man, I’ve been searching for info about this issue for weeks now! Unfortunately, the issue persists in FCP 7. Right now I’m dealing with converting DVCPRO HD footage to ProRes 422, and Media Manager deinterlaces it just as you describe! Very annoying, because there’s no way to make it stop other than exporting each clip manually from the timeline. Anyone else out there experiencing this and have any insight??

GRRR!