avchd to cinform, looks really bad
 

I have some footage shot on a Sony HDR-SR11. The footage looks amazing played with win media player. However when i bring it into Premiere pro CS5, it looks like crap. I have even tried converting it with Cinform neoscene, and it really looks bad. I have tried every combination of settings,

the clip i have is a pan, and there is lots of motion blur on the converted clip. but crystal clear when played on the win media player.

any suggestions on how or what to use to convert it so it looks just as good as when played in a media player?

the footage is interlaced 16923kbs 29.97fps here is a clip from my footage,

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5271200/00016.MTS

system- win7 pro
i7-920
8gig DDR3
Nvidia GTS 240
CS5 Master Collection

Interlaced looks bad these days with everything going progressive, nearly all HDTVs and every computer display. The MediaPlayer deinterlacer will likely depend on your graphics card, interlaced always looks bad to me (I tried your clip also.) It will always need to be deinterlaced for display, this will happen during bluRay playback by your TV, or via mediaplayer, but during the edit you see interlacing in all it glory horridness. You can select to deinterlace in Premiere to help it preview, although that will reduce the resolution, and motion smoothness; it is hard to win with interlaced sources. One reason that clip is so hard to handle, the high degree of motion, and the fast shutter speed. To get more natural motion for interlaced source, with or within deinterlacing, try to keep the shutter speed at 1/60th. At 1/60th shuttered source the Neo deinterlacer works best, no double image and more resolution.

thanks for your input and time for downloading my clip to try

Dave.

Windows media player automatically de-Interlaces footage, so your video regardless of the window size will look quite good on a progressive screen.
If you play the same footage with VLC, which does not by default de-interlace, it show the classic interlace artifacts when played on a progressive screen.

Cineform, unless instructed will not de-interlace on conversion with HDLink.

Unless you render your footage in CS5 out to a progressive format it will always show interlace artifacts when played on a progressive screen.

I personally used to export my video to a progressive format, but then i realised, i should just export to an interlaced format (keeping original format (50i or 60i), dimensions, data rate, etc) and use WMP when i wanted to watch it on my laptop. That way the exported video was as close to the original and it can be played on a TV.

Whatever the deinterlace method used by WMP. it seems to do a very good job of showing the video on a progessive screen, but with out the softening that can occur from some de-interlacing methods.

Keep in mind that this whole discussion relates only to preview image quality on different players (CS5, VLC, WMP, etc.) and not to the inherent image quality of the file, or the final image quality of the delivery product (DVD, Blu Ray, Web, etc.)
So, IMO if you shot interlaced, you should stay interlaced through the editing process even if you see some artifacts in the PPro previews. When you burn the final product out to BR and watch on HDTV- that's when you'll really see the good news.
Even if it's going to end up as progressive on the web, many feel that you should not deinterlace until the end of the workflow when you do the web encode.

..out to progressive for DVD, as is to BluRay
 

Notwithstanding various reservations (all in the past?) folks have had about Adobe's Media Encoder, I have had 3 years of good results on my cineform HDV (1080x1440 i60) and AVCHD (1080x1920 i60) by letting Encore do the work. I use a 7mpbs vbr progressive profile for DVD but "automatic" for BluRay. Occasionally I cannot get dynamic link to take the "headlessPremPro" timeline directly and have to render a full rez cineform first. When I can let Encore take it directly from PremPro (chapter marks and all), CS5 now does 30 minutes of source in about 55 minutes to finished .iso image file. Knocking down to DVD actually takes twice as long. This is with a fast quad, plenty of RAM and a Quadro FX3800 card which does the mpeg encode.

Don't know what is causing the mts clip to go bad but on my pc it runs very smooth with the playback set to Display First Field in CS5. No problem with conveting to CF and playing the avi.
Mind you this is a very fast pan for avchd. One should pan more slowly.