Canon 30f in Premiere Pro CS4
 

The Canon XH A1s shoots progressive video in its proprietary 30f mode. The video is essentially progressive but laid down to tape in an interlaced 30i stream. Premiere sees the 30f footage as interlaced, so in a progressive project it is automatically deinterlaced. Consequently, the video looses much detail and the editing is much more processor intensive. So the key here is keep Premiere from deinterlacing the videos. How is this done? Thanks!

Try right-click on the clip, select Field Options, select what you want PPro to do re interlacing /deinterlacing /Battle Vaughan

30F HDV is written to tape as progressive frames, not interlaced, so if you use the HDV 30p preset, no de-interlacing should occur.

SD (minDV) 30F is laid down as you described. You should be able to create a custom preset based on NTSC but progressive using the General tab in the Create New Sequence dialog box. If your project is SD, give that a try and let us know if it works for you.

Pete, yes my project is sd and that is exactly what I do. But as I said Premiere sees this footage as interlaced and automatically deinterlaces this already progressive footage.

Here's a visual example: http://huntnriggs.com/images/deinterlace.gif
Before = original clip
After = exported 30f clip from a DV-NTSC Widescreen 48kHz progressive project as progressive avi (as you can clearly see it has deinterlaced).

The picture has been processed in some way as the metadata show it to be a highly compressed (160k file size) two-frame 600x536 GIF, and the artifacts in the "after" frame do not look like interlace combing to my eye, but more like compression artifacts (almost a moire pattern?) of some type -- perhaps from the output codec settings you used and probably compression in the GIF itself. A frame grab should be 720x480 in an uncompressed format such as bmp or tif to be useful.

The SD NTSC data stream from tape is interlaced. The two fields must be put back together ("de-interlaced") by PPro in order to reconstruct the progressive frame. From there, unless you do something to create interlacing, there shouldn't be any.

Try a short uncompressed AVI export, using progressive settings in AME, from the original footage without any effects or processing applied and without resizing. Then let's see what that looks like. Otherwise, I'm at a loss based on the info so far.

Yes!!! I figured it out. To keep Premiere from deinterlacing SD 30f, right click on the video and hit "Interpret Footage". Then under field order select "Conform to:" and click "No Fields (Progressive Scan)". This will ensure maximum quality output by keeping Premiere from deinterlacing the already progressive footage.