Did I do a bad thing?
 

I have been working on a video in PPro for some time now and I need to be done with it by tomorrow. Just to be safe, I previewed my project on a small external monitor to make sure it would look right for TV. Well my project has a ton of slow motion and when I previewed it on my external TV, all parts with speed changes were jumpy. So in order to get slow motion to look acceptable on the TV, I needed to deinterlace as well as uncheck frame blend.

When I burned the DVD, I ‘m loosing some noticeable quality and getting some interlace artifacts (I think) like jagged edges, a lot of video noise. By rummaging through the posts at DVInfo, I discovered that by deinterlacing, I throw out half the image quality and that the deinterlace feature in Premiere is terrible.

Here's some info on my project: Shot with GL-1, some shots in 60i others with its frame movie mode. Edited in PPro 1.5, exported to DV AVI, transcoded and burned in Encore 1.5 at 7 CBR. I set lower fields first for everything.

I have searched through numerous posts but they give conflicting opinions, I'm still not clear what I should have done?

Here are a few issues I would like clarification on.

If the final output is for TV, should I deinterlace slow motion? If not, how do you make the footage look smooth? If so, what is the best way to retain quality?

Can I reinterlace my footage somehow, to revert back to the original quality?

When transcoding the footage for DVD, should I use lower fields or upper fields?


Thanks

Not sure if this will help, but I recently had quality issues with a deinterlaced project and decided to output it interlaced since it will mostly be viewed on interlaced televisions and if it were to be viewed on an LCD tv or computer, most software and tvs have an option to deinterlace or "Line Double". This makes sense as even the big studios do this with their tv originated target material, have you seen interlaced Macgyver episodes or even Jamie Kennedy on DVD? To output it interlace just go back into field options for the clip and select none. As far as your slow motion, you can try the different options in the field options as well.

Kevin

Is Frame Blending turned on in the field options for your slow motion clips? That should give you better quality, although it would probably be better to turn it off if you have your clips at 50% speed.

But like Kevin said, the best you can do is play around with the field options and see what work best.

Thanks for your help.

So if I go into the field options and select none, will Premiere reinsert the thrown out image and thereby increase the quality?

I have frame blend turned off because the motion is smoother that way.

Almost all my slow motion footage is at 50%, and I have tried every field option but to deinterlace and turn off frame blend gives the smoothest motion but alas not the best quality.

On another note, I made a test DVD, taking my original footage from the DV tape, keeping it interlaced, exported 3 versions (lower, upper, no fields) using DV avi. I burned those in Encore each with its corresponding field setting. The result was jumpy video for each one.

Since your footage is at 50%, the normally sixty interlaced frames per second now have to be spread out over twice the distance. Instead of each frame containing two fields, each frame now contains one field. Therefore, there is no way for Premiere to reinsert the thrown out image and increase the quality, because the fields were never thrown out to begin with.