Interlace to progressive in Prem CS4
 

Hi guys,

Just have a question for your good selves as I can't seem to find this particular answer anywhere.

A project I will be working on will have a mixture of 1440 x 1080i (HDV) and 1920 x 1080p (AVCHD) footage. What would be the best way to work with this to ultimately transfer to DVD and possibly to BR?

I assume I should place both sets of footage in a 1440 x 1080i HDV project at 1.33 aspect ratio. Logic says to me that I would have to export to 25p rather than 50i due to the 1080p footage. Is CS4 any good at converting 50i to 25p, or will I have to look elsewhere for some third party software?

Cheers
AJ

...........anyone???

For BR-disk you have no choice it all interlaced.
If you render to progressive on the hdv footage you will loose some quality. You are throwing away half the vertical resolution. Besides most dvd players handle interlaced just fine.
For pc get a descent dvd/BR player like Power dvd or WinDVD.
So my choice would be hdv 1080i25 for pal, ntsc would be 30.

Hi
If you would like the footage to look simmilar. I would choose to make a 1080 25P project. Edit the stuff and choose to deinterlace the interlaced footage (right click on the clip and choose Field options/always deinterlace) Now you wont see any difference on the two different kind of footage - but it will all be progresive....

There is no single correct answer to your question. The right answer depends on what you are doing and what tools you have available.

First, what type of program are you creating? If the program is full of fast action like a car race then the conversion from interlaced to progressive will be troublesome and could look bad unless you have motion-compensated interlaced to progressive conversion. On the other hand, a typical wedding will probably convert to progressive without too much difficulty. Converting from progressive to interlaced is less of an issue because all the information required for generating an interlaced field is contained in a progressive frame.

Second, which type of camera will be used to capture most of the program content? If one type of camera is only being used for a few shots then convert that footage to match the principal camera output.

Third, is the picture sharpness from the 1080p camera much better than the picture from the HDV camera? Is it worth using 1080p as your production format to preserve the better quality? AVCHD will require more computer resources and generally take longer to edit than HDV unless you are using a powerful editing system.

Fourth, if the picture from the 1080p camera is sharper, do you want the difference to be evident each time you cut from camera to camera? Using HDV as the production format will reduce horizontal resolution to 1440 from 1920 and reduce the sharpness of the 1080p camera footage.

Finally, you state that the output will be DVD which is an interlaced format. BR also supports interlaced so you might be influenced by this reality. Do you have any plans to distribute the material in a progressive format at 1080p50 that would justify this production format?

I suggest that you perform some tests first with the types of cameras you plan to use in your production. Shoot the same type of material as your project with both cameras at the same time. Test the footage on HDV and 1080p50 timelines to see how it works. Cut the material together to see how the images look when placed one after the other. You may well have some basic work to do on adjusting the cameras to provide similar images.

Good luck.

Thanks for the assistance guys.

This current project is a wedding, and will be using 70% HDV cam and 30% vDSLR.
Forgot that 25p doesn't work on BR, so I'll either have to use interlace or 24p - not ideal.

Upon reviewing footage from last year, my footage has been exported to DVD as interlaced, however on reflection, this has appeared to smooth and natural (and videoey). There's nothing wrong with it, however looking at samples of progressive footage exported onto DVD (and clips of mine posted online), I feel this is the way to go to achieve the results I am after.