Using Vegas 11, latest version, I render my 1080i footage for bluray, looks amazing.

I render it to DVD, and the interlacing is horrible. Really bad. I tried rendering progressive and it's exactly the same. There is something wrong here.

On top of that, similar to my last project, I get a "Vegas Pro Has Stopped Working" thingy, but it appears to keep rendering.

The interlacing is SO bad I cannot imagine sending it out to a client, but it has to go soon.

I think the only thing I can do in the future is to convert the footage to progressive using Cineform, but what a nightmare that is. File sized are stupid big, and I don't really have time, I'm so behind. Besides, I shouldn't have to.

The shutdown noticed didn't pop up on my tenth attempt at rendering, but the interlacing is the same. Whenever there is motion in the scene, it's there.

Here are some screenshots taken while rendering. The photos do not show how bad it really is, but it gives an idea of what it looks like.

As I watch it play it's much worse than the photos show.

Here's a good shot of the issue.

As a test you could try turning of gpu rendering under >preferences>video , restart vegas and render a small loop region. While I have not experienced your problem, I have found that Nvidea/GPU rendering can have strange results or "Vegas has stopped working" crashes. But the same project would render perfect with CPU rendering. If the test render is good then you can render out your project in full. If the test render is not good then something is odd with the project/render settings.

Thanks Ray.

mpeg 2 for dvd doesn't utilize gpu rendering, I don't think anyway. I turned it off anyway for the last render, didn't help, it was exactly the same.

FWIW, the field order, upper, was set correctly to match the orignal footage properties.

Ok good to know

I'm guessing here but

Is the bit rate high enough for fast moving frames? Maybe the encoder is reducing quality to stay within the project bit rate settings

It does happen to be set lower than default, but I've used this setting dozens of times with no issues. I originally had it set to default and it was pretty much bad then too, about the same.

I'm deinterlacing the footage using Cineform, and I'll have to swap out the files in the project.

Ray, I changed the settings to the default bit rate, and set properties to best, and the issue is largely gone.

So you were correct, thank you.

I am so hating interlaced footage these days.

Thats great you got it sorted Jeff.
For anyone in the future who needs a fast way around this....

You edit your interlaced project for Bluray output, you also want a fast way ( this is not the highest quality way, but it is fast ) DVD version of the same project.
Change project settings to
Field order= None
Deinterlace method= Interpolate Fields.
Save as a new name ie. xxxxxxx Wedding for nesting
Open a new project with your DVD template settings PAL or NTSC
Check the Adjust source media to better match render settings (to lose any letter or pillar boxing).
Drag in your saved .veg
done.

Vegas appears to have a horrible time resizing interlaced footage, and whats worse, sometimes it goes ok, and sometimes you get what Jeff had in the pic above.
The above method removes the interlacing in the larger project, before scaling.
The other alternative would be to render 50/60p, down convert, then re interlace.

Thanks Gerald. I've read around the web that upper field order can be particularly problematic for Vegas, which is what I have.

In the end I still had to cut out footage to shorten the project enough to make 3 hours fit on a dual layer disc. I found the lowest bit rate that still looked good. With interlaced footage I now understand you cannot lower the bit rate as much as you can with progressive footage.

Thanks for your help guys.

I recognized the problem the moment I saw the jpg. As the other poster mentioned, there is something queer with how Vegas resizes images. My guess would be that it only resizes deinterlaced images - meaning that interlaced material is resized by frames rather than fields which lead to strange looking 'teeth'. This would be something you have little control over - other than to select blended or interpolated deinterlacing, which is necessary even if you are outputting to interlaced form. One option that helps at time is to select the 'reduce interlace flicker' option for the media also.

For thes above reasons, I use the Virtualdub program for resizing material since it canl handle fields individually. It's a bit of a pain to do - and I wouldn't recommend anyone do it with anything other than a lossless codec such as Lagarith to avoid generational errors. I prefer to resize material before editing, because to do it after editing means you need to output the edited material, resize, and then output again in final form. However, if you need to generate final form material in different sizes, you must wait until editing is complete.

Solutions are out there, they're just not obvious or particularly simple.

Solutions are out there, they're just not obvious or particularly simple.

While not obvious, all you need to to do is set deinterlacing mode to interpolate frames to properly resize interlaced HD video to interlaced SD video in Vegas. In particular, if you have the deinterlacing mode set to none in the preferences then Vegas makes a mess of the scaling as depicted in the screenshot above.

Yes of course, there's the interpolate. But it is *important* to point out that both 'blend' and 'interpolate' are compromises with consequences. There is no holy grail for converting interlaced footage to progressive. There are *definite* costs in terms of clarity with these methods, which is why if the internal method of Vegas is to resize by frame - you've made those compromises and have a right to be aware of them.

Of course, if you are pleased with the results, than there''s no reason not to stick with what works. If not, as I said...

Hi Jeff

I remember getting the exact same thing when I tried to resize interlaced 4:3 footage to 16:9 ...My workflow with 50i is to match the media with Vegas and I always use BLEND as the de-interlacing method...I was told that use INTERPOLATE only if you have a lot a high speed movement (which doesn't happen at weddings at all!!) If I'm wrong then anyone can correct me but tell me why???

The other neat trick is to drop the Sony Sharpen plugin on all video tracks BUT leave it at zero (I have no idea why but it certainly makes a huge difference to your SD footage ..logic says it shouldn't but it does)

When you transcode with Cineform the footage will go in interlaced BUT does Cineform do anything to the interlacing??? I remember with Upshift I had an option to de-interlace in the transcode software (I don't use it any more as the i7 handles the AVCHD perfectly!!)

Chris

Out of interest I just did a conversion on an old mpg 2 tv capture I had,
Uff 720x 576
I tried a few different ways but the best by far was HDlink.
It upscaled to 720p and deinterlaced at the same time. As another bonus the dynamic range also increased, would the 4.2.0 to 4.2.2 color space do that?
Out of interest, if time wasn't a factor, what is the most lossless way to turn interlaced footage progressive?
I used to think Yadiff was pretty good but my tests today suggest otherwise.

Chris/ Gerald: HDLink (Cineform) is amazing, It definitely deinterlaces beautifully. I had started to convert the files yesterday but when I found I could just up the bit rate to smooth things out I went with that. The DVDs are in the mail and they look fine.

Vegas can do the job, but it's truly just a matter of figuring things out.

Last year I used HD link to convert every wedding, and the results were always stunning for DVD, and I had no issues lowering bit rates to fit projects to discs.

Now I've got 1080i footage from all cameras for a couple of projects, and I didn't want to convert everything, it's just too time consuming and eats up too much space.

I’ve got the exact same problem as Jeff when rendering to DVD. My footage is 1920/50i – PAL . When rendering to PAL-DVD it looks horrible. Then after a few days, trying to solve this problem, I rendered from 1920/PAL to a NTSC format-DVD. This looks much better than rendering to PAL-DVD(I can't use this anyway). How can this be explained?

I solved this problem by rendering a HQ *.mp4-file(included audio). Imported this MP4-file into Pinnacle Studio 15 and downconverted(rendered) this file to 720*576 DV-quality. Then burned my DVD in DVDA. The quality looks very good and I'm impressed of this result.....

Leif

Good thinking Leif, good job.

This is a problem I am well aware of and I can tell you exactly what is going on.

Vegas resizes interlaced footage and progressive footage differently (as it should). The proper way to resize a progressive image is obvious: you just resize each frame like you would a still photograph.

Interlaced footage is a bit more tricky, especially if you are resizing an interlaced image at one size and outputting interlaced footage at another.

What you need to do is separate the even and odd fields, resize each independently, then fold them back together alternately by even and odd lines. In other words, every even line gets taken from one resized field, every odd line from another.

In Virtualdub or AVI Synth, the way to do this is with a chain of filters:

1: a separate into fields (either side by side or one over top of the other instead of alternating lines).
2: a resize filter that will resize these two side by side (or one over top of the other) fields.
3: a "refold" filter that will take every even line from one image, every odd line from the other, then "refold" them into a new interlaced image at the new size (SD DVD instead of HD for instance).

Vegas actually is very cool in that it does all this transparently in the background. That's the good news. The bad news is that Vegas is easily confused and that is exactly what is happening in this instance. The interlaced frames are being resized frame by frame with no regard to the interlace or even and odd fields. What you are seeing is a resizing of the interlace comb which is aliasing into a new frequency and thus is forming a resized interlace comb that is no longer happening at even and odd line points. Yeah, it looks terrible.

The reason this is happening is because you are resizing from one interlaced size to another, but you chose "none" for your deinterlace method instead of "blend fields" or "interpolate". For some strange reason, when you select no deinterlace method (which would make sense since you don't actually want to deinterlace) and you render to a new interlaced size, you get very strange looking aliased interlace comb artifacts. This is exactly what I am seeing in your posted screen captures.

Here is what you need to know.

1/ When you are working with interlaced HD and you want to make an SD DVD, the best looking option is to make an interlaced SD DVD out of your interlaced HD footage. Yes, you can deinterlace, but most of the time it will not look nearly as good as if you go interlaced to interlaced.

2/ When you are resizing from one size of interlaced to another, you need to to select a deinterlace method. It doesn't matter if you choose "blend fields" or "interpolate" because you are not going to actually deinterlace. It makes no difference which one you choose. You just can't select "none".

3/ With a deinterlace method selected, just render to one of the SD interlaced templates at the same frame rate (60i if you're NTSC, 50i if you're in one of the PAL countries).

4/ With the deinterlace method selected, go ahead and try rendering to an MPEG2 DVD widescreen template and it will look great.

What Vegas will be doing when you select a deinterlace method but render to a new interlaced size is the following: separate the even and odd fields, resize them separately, and fold them back by even and odd lines into the newly resized frames. Very cool once you figure this out.

I must say that when I ran into this, it took me a good six months to figure out, and nobody I talked to at the time had any clue what was going on. This has been an issue from even before HD. I first ran into this when I was trying to make 16:9 SD renders out of 4:3 interlaced footage. Since doing this is an interlaced to interlaced resize, I ran into exactly the same artifacts doing this as well.

That was the long answer. The short answer is this:

When you are working with interlaced HD footage and you want to render out a DVD:

1/ Select a deinterlace method (it can be either "blend fields" or "interpolate", it doesn't matter since you aren't actually going to deinterlace).

2/ Render to the widescreen interlaced mpeg 2 template format to make your DVD.

This will give you a widescreen interlaced SD DVD that looks perfect.

If you don't select a deinterlace method, Vegas will do the resize from HD to SD without regard for the interlace comb. The result of this will be an aliasing of the interlace comb that will give you large resized comb artifacts that look absolutely terrible.

Laurence, thanks for this very clear description of Vegas' processes for resizing.

There's been so much talk of inferior and superior methods of deinterlace and resize, with opaque references to "Vegas doesn't do it the best way..."; your research and method very clearly show how to get Vegas' best possible results for this common process.

It also explains why some people have never seen these interlace artifacts in their resized projects.

What if your working with progressive HD footage and are going to DVD? I've been getting some shimmering in brick and floors with horizonal lines. I have always selected none in project properties for deinterlace method.

I've done few the last few weeks, as mentioned previous, for best quality, I would export to Cineform and let HD link do the resize.
In Vegas though, this works,

1920x 1080 Progressive,
Project setting-Deinterlace = None (of course),
Render to -Elementary DVD streams, just use the DVD architect template but change the fields to None.
This gives you a progressive DVD .

1920x1080 Interlaced UFF
Project setting-Deinterlace = blend or interpolate.
Render to- same as above, dvd architect template, but set your fields the same as your source.
This gives you an interlaced DVD.

1920x1080 Interlaced UFF into Progressive (for web delivery)
Project setting-Deinterlace = blend or interpolate.
Render to- mp4 of your choosing , it will not have any image issues but the quality does go down.

Thanks to Laurence for a great explanation :)

Anyone using the Yadif deinterlace plug-in?

Yep, have been over the last few months , have to say though, just using Vegas' own Deinterlace via project properties gives about same quality at about 10th of render time.
My opinion only, show me some frame grabs and prove me wrong
:)

I'm wondering if you get the same results when playing the DVD on a DVD player to a TV? The interlaced fields are noticeable on a PC monitor but usually not a DVD player. I'm still using Vegas 9 have jumped yet. Might need to wait for 12 now. That seems the hard part is trying to fool proof any project for all the different ways people can play them back.

You won't see interlace artifacts playing a DVD to a regular interlaced TV, because that's what interlacing is designed for.

Yep, have been over the last few months , have to say though, just using Vegas' own Deinterlace via project properties gives about same quality at about 10th of render time.
My opinion only, show me some frame grabs and prove me wrong
:)

Does an optimized plug-in exist , even as a commercial product? I'm toying with the idea of optimizing the Yadif plug-in for nVidia GPUs as my first CUDA project. My main impediment is that I have not shot interlaced footage since my purchase of the Sony EX1, so the benefit of the accelerated plug-in would be for my older footage.