This is probably a silly question but one that it is bugging me: I like the way Compressor does de-interlacing a lot (even though it takes many hours / days even!) and made a DVD recently which looked great (the best I've managed). But if I want to maintain full quality how do I use Compressor just to de-interlace while leaving the original file (from FCP) uncompressed? I've looked at all the templates and couldn't decide between the uncompressed 8 bit formats or matching my FCP project settings (DV PAL in this instance) or perhaps it's something else?

As a point of interest I'd been converting the video to Prores format to improve motion blurring once converted for DVD (as recommend on this forum and which worked) but if I used Compressor's de-interlacing this proved unnecessary.

If you want to de-interlace without compressing you should try export>quicktime from final cut and create a reference video by leaving "self contained" unchecked.
Open the video in Quicktime, and hit apple+J to bring up the properties. Select the video track and choose the visual settings tab. There you can de-interlace by checking the box or alternatively check the "single field" box if you prefer. Always remember to check high quality as some peoples machines do not have that set up correctly in the preferences and your video (depending on the codec) will look worse than garbage. Before saving make sure you are at the beginning of the quicktime because it also saves where you are in the video.
For some reason this method doesn't seem to work with self contained videos.

Thanks Aric - will try that. From your recommendation I assume you consider this a high quality de-interlacer? I ask because I have some very complex rapid movement in some shots which seem problematic to process and Compressor offers quite sophisticated tools to cope with this.

Compressor offers quite sophisticated tools to cope with this.

A few alternative methods:


Standards Converter by Graeme Nattress has a GREAT deinterlacer and is a useful plug-in to have around anyhoo

DVfilm is another great de-interlacer, faster than Compressor and will only deinterlace areas that move (you can vary the strengh of this too)

Red Giant has a deinterlace tool, albeit a little pricey


I've used the Standards Converter a month or two ago as a deinterlacer, the rest I haven't used for a couple of years (since going Progressive throughout).