How important is De-interlacing ?

[iparout]

Hi all...

I am capturing off my VCR and then convert to VCD and burn it on a disk which will (hopefully) play on standalone DVD players (I don't own one yet). I am using Premiere to edit the capture file and then export to TMPGEnc and encode to VCD.

One of the guys here suggested that I should use De-interlace Odd-Even field adaptation cause it will yield better quality in my VCD output file...

I created some sample files with De-interlace on, however I notice that the picture is *SLIGHTLY* worse in quality when displayed on TV using ther TV-out.

What I want to ask is really how importand is de-interlace in such video jobs (conversions to VCD), especially when it comes down to playing the CD on a standalone DVD player ? Does de-interlacing improve the quality when the VCD is played on a standalone DVD player ? (Unfortunately I don't have one yet, that's why I can't test it and come to my own conclusions).

Thanks for any input.

[Sciascia]

It really depends on your source video in my experience. Trial and error. And yes there is a noticeable difference in the standalone and PC playback as you noted. The final MPEG clip has to be progressive though as that is the VCD spec. To let you knw though, I gave up on VCD as the quality was really poor in my opinion. SVCD was much better, but it is a real bear to find a good compatible standalone player. I had one at one time and it died on me and my new one doesn't support it. DVD-R is probably the next step for me, reason being that you just can't expect too much from MPEG video at such a low bitrate. The most important thing is to make sure that the source video is absolutely as pristine as possible. Garbage in = Garbage out. Especially with MPEG encoders.

I personally used V-Dub with a few filters to clean it up and then used smart deinterlace instead of a full blown deinterlace filter. You can adjust the sensitivity and it makes a big difference. Frameserve to TMPGEnc. TMPGEnc has a lot of filters, but V-Dub has better quality filters.

Resize to 352*240
Temporal cleaner,
2D cleaner
Smart deinterlace
and then frameserve.

Remember hat less filtering is beter so take it easy on the amount of each filter. Just use the preview window in V-Dub to make it look as clean as possible without losing detail and smoothing it too much.

[iparout]

Looks like you are the one answering all my questions here... LOL Thanks a lot... I appreciate it.

BTW, I will still not apply any de-interlace fitlers, however I'll try your other suggestions to clean the clip.

Thanks again.