Trapped in an Interlaced Nightmare
 

I participated in 48 Hour Film contest a few weeks back. In the mad rush to get the film done on time, I yielded the digitizing duties to some of my friends. What I didn't know, was that our cameraman shot in 24P SD mode on his Canon XHA1.

I cut the film in FCP Studio 2, and everything looked fine on our DVD submission. However, now that I'm trying to render an output for the web, interlacing is rearing its ugly head. I'm exporting a color corrected 1280x720 final version from After Effects for HD delivery to YouTube. There is noticeable detail loss if I turn field render off, and noticeable interlacing with it on. Part of the challenge here is this is 3:2 pulldown material that was digitized and edited as 30i, yielding the guess 3:2 pulldown and 24 advanced options completely useless to me.

Does anyone have any methods they might share which reduce the interlacing in AE? I've already tried Andrew Kramer's very dated interlacing tutorial and found the results weren't significantly better than using after effects' built-in options. I'm also aware that FCP has the ability to digitize 24p advanced directly as 24p footage, but I don't believe this functionality is available once you've already digitized and edited your footage.

If you can figure out a way to process the footage, and replace/relink the source files to new, deinterlaced footage, it should do the trick?

Try using something like MPEG Streamclip, Compressor, or AFX to render all of the files into pure 24p, no interlacing. Then, in FCP, select all of the clips in the timeline and 'make offline'. you probably do NOT want to delete the media files when asked! Then, go to reconnect media and point it in the direction of the folder with your new, deinterlaced media. You may have to tinker with the composition settings, but it may work out nicely for you.