HDLink and Canon HF10 30P-in-60i chroma?
 

For the past year I've been using a Canon HF10, and when using 30P-in-60i have had interlaced-chroma artifacts, which I put down to being an inherent artifact of the camera. (Indeed I assumed this was why people complain in general about 30P-in-60i footage from any camera.)

This week I bought a HMC40, and a poster on another forum asked if its 30P-in-60i had chroma artifacts. So I converted clips from both cameras using HDLink, grabbed frames from both avis, and on inspection concluded that the HF10 had the problem and the HMC40 did not.

But then ... I got a response back arguing that the HF10 chroma interlace was simply a problem of incorrect H264 splitting/decoding and if it was done 'properly' (the poster recommended using avisynth and libavcodec) then the two cameras performed very similarly. Which indeed seems to be true (see the comparison below).

The reason I am posting here is that the decoder itself did not seem to be the issue (I tried Mainconcept/Adobe2, ffdhow, and Microsoft's DTV-DVD decoder in Win7) ... what made the difference was whether I used HDLink or Avisynth. The suggestion was made that HDLink (and Premiere and AE also, apparently) incorrectly report the progressive/interlaced status of the Canon footage to the decoder, whereas they get it right for the Panasonic.

Any thoughts/claifications on this would be appreciated!

Hmmm ... cricket, cricket .... I should have asked a more direct question.

So .... can anyone recommend a way to prevent HDLink introducing nasty chroma interlace artifacts when decoding Canon HF-series 30P-in-60i footage?

For example, would installing a different splitter or decoder on the system help?