DV Footage Interlace Problem?

[Vishad Dewan]

I finished editing a 115 min. wedding video and output to DVD. But the DVD footage seems really weird; there's ghosting in the picture as well as interlacing problems.

I went back into FCP and de-interlaced the footage, which helped. But the footage is still not sharp.

I captured the video on my Canon XL2 at 60i, 4:3. What's going on here? What should I be doing?

Is there any way to fix this problem???

Thanks.

[Aric Mannion]

You shouldn't de-interlace footage going to a dvd. I'm told that you can't make a non interlaced SD DVD, so it would probably just interlace it again. Try watching it on a regular TV, it may look good. Your computer is not interlaced, it's formatted for a tube TV.
Also make sure your final cut settings are the highest they can be.

[Vishad Dewan]

Yeah, the FCP settings are at the max. The DVD picture on my LCD TV looks okay from ten feet away, but the closer I get the more "interlaced" the picture looks. There are diagonal lines running across the video, and I'm not quite sure what to do about this.

Is there any way I can clean up the video?

[Jim Fields]

Vishad,

An old trick I learned somewhere to make interlaced look a little more like progressive turned out to be a simple stupid trick.

you have your footage on track 1. copy the entire timeline and paste that onto track 2.
Place a de-interlace filter on each track for the entire project.
Make track 2 upper for de-interlace
Make track 1 lower for de-interlace.
Set the opacity for the first clip on track 2 to 38%-50% (I choose 38%)
Copy that clip.
Paste attributes from clip one of track 2 to the rest of the project on track 2
You will only copy/paste attributes for opacity, and only apply to track 2

Render.
You will have more progressive, less interlace, it will export cleaner, and look fine on TV's like Plasma's, LCD's and even Tubes.

How this works, I cant remember, but it does.

[Vishad Dewan]

Thanks, Jim! That sounds like it's pretty doable. I'll try it out this afternoon and let you know how it works out.

[Vishad Dewan]

Okay, well, for those of you who want to know whether Mpeg Streamclip worked or not, here's the rundown:

I converted my 115m clip to Mpeg video, then imported it into Streamclip. I selected QT export and chose the Deinterlace option, while retaining the original clip size. After about half an hour for encoding it gave me a .mov file. Now, I reconvered the .mov file to a Mpeg2 video file using VisualHub (for whatever reason Compressor wouldn't take my .mov video and convert it into 120m DVD video; I opened the video, then selected by parameters, and clicked Submit...but Compressor just sat there and looked at me like I was an idiot. I also tried importing the .mov file back into FCP, but then I'd have to fiddle around with the settings so FCP wouldn't wag its finger and tell me I'm a moron for trying to bring in a clip with the wrong settings...ahh).

So, after VisualHub did its thing I made a quick DVD with iDVD 08; I played the DVD and although the interlacing artifacts were gone, there was a CONSIDERABLE amount of noise in the video. It turns out that through all that converting and reconverting, either noise got added or the video just degraded. It could also be that iDVD decided to re-interlace my long hours of deinterlacing. What a hoot.

For my second option, I'm trying to duplicate the sequence and add the deinterlace filter to both clips, setting the 2nd to lower, and the 1st to upper, with 38% opacity to the 2nd video clip.

In four hours I should know if this works. I HOPE IT DOES!

PS: Does anyone know for sure if iDVD interlaces video during encoding?

Thanks again everyone for all your help! I'll keep you all posted.