Not HD, but still P2.........I shoot DVCPRO50 30p, and in Sony Vegas, it keeps defaulting me to "upper field first".

Shouldn't it be "progressive", or if DVCPRO50 wraps progressive in an interlaced format, shouldn't it be lower field first? I render out to 720-30p, so I don't know if this makes a real difference or not, but it's been bugging me. :)

Paul

Once a while I use this legacy codec on the SDX900, which by the way still produces quite nice 8-bit 4:2:2 video. It's over 10 years old but still has its own distinctive look. Anyway, I find that I must manually set it each clip to PROGRESSIVE or else 30p is not 30p in FCP 7 or X. It will try to make it as 60i on a 30p captured footage. DV50 is always interlaced as a codec default. This is especially true w/ the DV50 deck when you capture it via the preset. IT always be interlaced no matter what. I guess progressive was added after the codec got released. If you set it to lower field first, wide shot are very likely to be pixellated. Not sure about other NLE but the same principle should be applied because I had to do it in Adobe After FX CS6 w/ its field interpretation.

Paul - That was a bug in Vegas 12 and the latest update (Build 670) was supposed to fix the field issue.

Due to an anticipated move to DVCPRO HD, I have made the switch to a MacBook with FCP 7.......and yes, my progressive footage shows as lower field dominance in inspector. I tried changing field dominance to none, but the resulting 720p footage still looks HORRIBLE. The jaggies and stair-step effects are insane.....yet the video remains very soft.

I have switched my camera to 60i, which FCP seems to like better. The video is still soft though. If I try to apply a sharpening filter, I get horrific interlacing lines. Adding a deinterlacing filter through FCP or Compressor results in 4-5 minute per minute export times, as well as frequent all pink video. That 4-5 minutes turns into 7-8 minutes if I don't use my virtual cluster.

Sony's $79 Movie Studio can make better 720p files out of 480p footage.......NLE's annoy me to no end.

This is real odd. I use FCP 7.0.3 from time to time and all of the legacy DVC PRO HD 720/60p footage looks clean as true progressive w/ absolutely no nasty interlaced artifacts. Shot on HVX200, HPX2000, HPX2700 P2s. I never have any issue w/ nasty interlace artifacts.. The inspector shows that it's a progressive native format. You are using FCP 7's Log & XFer right or your footage is captured from tape? The only possibility that I can think why you're seeing nasty interlaced artifacts is that it it's from a tape camcorder (HDX900, Varicam 1 F27) and you're capturing from Firewire w/ the incorrect preset. But if it's all P2 native, there should not be any interlaced problem in FCP7. Or you have a mixed format sequence in FCP 7.0.3.

This is DVCPRO50 SD P2 footage. All attempts to manual set to "none" and export DVCPRO50 results in lower filed dominance rendered files.

I know that DVCPRO 24/30p TAPE footage is recorded in a 60i "wrapper" so to speak. My guess is that FCP treats all DV material as de facto interlaced, in the same was my 30p footage outputs as 60i using SDI.

I am sticking with standard 60i exporting to 720p without enhancements. Playing with sharpening and deinterlacing settings results in 5x increases in export times.