[Pippa Young]

Hello Joe,

Many many thanks for such an in depth and constructive reply! It’s very kind of you to take the time to look into this issue and share your two cents.

It’s easy to overcomplicate interlaced/progressive problems but your post makes things clearer.

On your recommendation I purchased Invisor , a good tool for file inspection. As I suspected the files that refused to be deinterlaceds were interlaced in the first place so at least FCP recognised them correctly.
I used Handbrake fairly successfully to de-interlace my export but the quality loss is more definite than when FCP does work de-interlacing clips. How strange that it should fail to do so with some clips and work on others! It
My output is web upload so VLC/Quicktime de-interlacing is not helpful here unfortunately. I also realised today that YouTube de-interlaces which is very handy!

You recommended putting the definitely interlaced clips into a manually-created 1080p project in FCP but I tried this before and still got ugly lines. I think I will use an external programme- Handbrake, EditReady to defeat the interlace problem. Would you deinterlace with EditReady for the highest quality output?
MBAFF is a confusing concept, no wonder FCPX gets in a muddle!

I might buy EditReady rather than continue trying to get FCP to sort out these issues.
I hope you don’t mind if I ask another question, about EditReady, I did some reading and I wondered… Many editors re-wrap all their footage with this programme before importing into FCP or Adobe. I know it makes file naming more efficient and can sort out messy AVCHD files but does it also make for a quicker render from Compressor? Compressor seems to struggle with my hour long videos and often gives me 5 hour render times, I was wondering if a re-wrap of the footage first through EditReady would speed up these render times?

Many many thanks for your time and help, greatly appreciate it!

Pippa