When should I use the Progressive option when capturing/converting?

[Paul Cascio]

I shoot in 1080i and my final product will be DVD or Blu-Ray/H.264 or WMV-HD.

Thanks

[David Newman]

If you shoot interlace, use either automatic or interlaced encoding.

[Hugh Mobley]

I have had very good luck capturing as avi letting cineform de-interlace then edit as progressive, and render as progressive, for a dvd as mpeg2 progressive
for a dvd. works for me

[Paul Cascio]

That's what I was figuring. If you're going to end up deinterlacing, when is the right time to do it?

[Bill Ravens]

I'm aware of the switch for Progressive/Interlaced in Cineform's HDLink. My assumption is that it's to match the conversion to the type, not designed to deinterlace footage. David, which is it?

[David Newman]

The interlace vs progressive is a switch to optimize the encoder, not deinterlace wich has it own switch.

[Bill Ravens]

OIC....
thanx

[Kris Bird]

If I'm capturing 1080/25F from an XH-A1/XL-H1, will there be any difference in capturing with "Auto", vs "Progressive"? i.e., should I manually specify to be safe, or will Auto always get it right in this scenario?

(I *always* manually specify, since I'm a post-freak and the idea that it might be dropping vertical detail because it's treating P as I scares me ;)

[David Newman]

In that case set progressive. The auto mode assume progressive for all resolution other than 480, 486, 576 and 1080. If deinterlace or pulldown removal is set with one these resolutions, automatic will switch to progressive. All native 24/25/30p 1080 sources, you should set progressive.

[Stephen Armour]

There is some confusion here, and it would be nice to have a little clarification. We just captured HDV MPEG's (problem with batch capture not resolved), converted them via HDLink to 1080i, then experimented with outputting them from AE as 1080p.

I couldn't tell the difference between that and making them progressive-non-interlaced first with HDLink, or just waiting and outputting them as 60i converted to 30p.

Whew! What's the pro's and con's here? Seems like it's 6 of one, half dozen of the other! Better to convert to 30p before editing in PP3, or is it better to do the conversion at capture time, then do EVERYTHING as progressive/non-interlaced in post?

[David Newman]

The workflows can look different. But it is your choice.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by David Newman

The workflows can look different. But it is your choice.

I retract what I said before...there IS definitely a difference as to the end results, and it becomes very apparent when running things through AE.

We found it is definitely better to convert the 60i HDV tapes directly to 1920 x 1080p using the deinterlace switch in HDLink, instead of taking them as interlaced, but up-scaled to 1920 10bit.

There is no doubt on the lower lightlevel footage we shot in the jungle, where there was some movement and some noise from lower light levels. Even in higher lighting situations with movement, the conversion is cleaner and superior done that way.

We have returned to our former workflow (which gave very good results) and are recapturing all over again, one by one, as our problems with PP3 batch capture not working have not been resolved.

David, workflow DOES matter and they definitely look different, at least with our V1 material.