I was wondering what the proper work flow would be when i want to deinterlace a project. I mean should i deinterlace then edit or edit then deinterlace? Also what is the best way to deinterlace?

I know these sound like newby questions, but i have just been dealing with the comb look on all my footage, and when i say all my footage I mean every single clip. All I really film is skating so there is a lot of motion in every shot.

Matt,

I think the reason 100 have read this post but no-one has answered is that the question is very big and opens up several cans of worms with lots of possible answers.

I'm not an expert but have learnt a thing or two from folk on here. The simple answer is to de-interlace at the very end. You need to use something like Compressor to do a good job on it, though FCP has a filter which does the job (not very well - softens the image too much). Render times can be VERY long though in Compressor at the highest quality settings.

To avoid seeing the interlacing while you are working you need a decent monitoring system - I use the Matrox MXO mini which connects to the express card slot on the Mac and completely by-passes the poor Mac graphics card (and DVI out) and does good de-interlacing on the fly as well as offering excellent colour monitoring.

If you do some careful searches on this forum you should find all you need to know,

Geoff

Thank you very much for responding I will start using compressor after my final renders. AS for the monitor i doubt I'll get a new one cause I don't care if I see it during the edits as long as I know there gone for post on the web, even though I know my audience will not know the difference, that is if I have a audience

Personally when editing interlaced footage in Final Cut I go to the sequence settings and change the interlace fields to "none". That throws half the fields away and technically makes the resolution lower. I really don't care though because I can't work with interlaced images since I incorporate animations and effects, and even if the resolution is lower it still looks better to me than those obtrusive interlace lines. It is definitely better than FCP's terrible de-interlace filter.

You can de interlace later with a better tool after you export your final video, but if you do any effects like adjusting the scale of a clip or even adding text, it's just going to make things look worse to de-interlace it.