Zooming in on HDV in DV sequence?
 

I keep trying to zoom in on my HDV in a DV sequence (since HDV is so much larger) But the interlacing is horrible! I thought the interlacing issue was mentioned here before, but are there any thoughts on this? Even if I don't zoom, downconverting seems to have interlacing issues.

I have seen the same thing in FCP also. I tried dropping my HDV sequence into a 16:9 DV sequence and rendered. Using digital cinema desktop on my 21" LCD LCD monitor the sequence looked fine. But sending the DV over firewire through my DVD recorder to a 22" widescreen LCD via component video looked terrible. There were, as you describe, lots of strange interlace artifacts which made the footage completely unusable.

However, exporting the sequence as a Qucktime DV file gave acceptable results. I haven't spent much time exploring this, but it seems like FCP just can't do a very good job scaling HD to SD. I know that older versions of FCP were not good at scaling image, but thought maybe that had been fixed in FCP 5. Guess not...

So I'd suggest that you export your DV sequence as a Quicktime movie and see if you get better results. Rendering takes awhile on my dual G5 2.5ghz machine... I think a 1 hour sequence took about 4 hours.

Export the edited DV sequence? It still looks bad, unless you mean to say export/compress the hdv before I edit it in the DV project -that I have not tried.

I took my edited DV sequence and exported as a Quicktime movie (widescreen DV) and it looked better than printing to video. I didn't do any zooming however. Your mileage may vary. I imagine you could get better results using Compressor, but I am still baffled by that program...

The only way I've been able to use HDV clips in a DV timeline is if I go to "Sequence"..."Settings"...and set "Field Dominance" to "none". It'll clean things right up. It doesn't seem to affect your DV footage much either. The HDV stuff will look like it's de-interlaced now. It's MUCH, MUCH sharper and cleaner though.

I'm not sure why any of this is, but I agree, FCP doesn't handle the upper field to lower field conversion very well.