Hmm, for some reason, whatever I do, I'm getting combing.

If I set the toggle to pre or post, there is still combing. If I try applying the deinterlacer before cropping, or after cropping, it still combs. I haven't found one way yet that gets rid of the combing, I'm sure I had it once though but now it's gone...

The only way I can get it acceptable is to get the footage raw, deinterlace it, then open it in a new project and pan and crop then. But I've just spent weeks editing a project and I really don't want to have to dissect it clip by clip, deinterlacing it and cropping it all again and placing it back in place perfectly

EDIT: Aha! It works when I apply the deinterlace to the EVENT ONLY, not the entire track... that sorta in my head makes sense but I don't know why

EDIT 2: Well, it looks fine in the preview window, but I just rendered it all then as an avi and it's got combing again... can't understand it, the deinterlace effect is set to each individual event and it's set to PRE toggle

Make sure that you're using *either* the Mike Crash Smart Deinterlace OR the Vegas deinterlacing (Project Properties Dialog), not both at once. Vegas deinterlacing will work in the appropriate places to prevent combing, whereas Smart Deinterlace will be applied in whatever part of the chain you apply it.

I personally find that using Vegas "Interpolate" method gives me excellent results, and only use Smart Deinterlace for special cases.

Also, you can disable the deinterlace filter that Vegas applies to the Preview: Preferences/Preview/Apply Deinterlace Filter

This will let you monitor exactly what your output will really look like.

the deinterlace filter for the preview window - that only seems to apply if you have an external preview device. i can only see a tickbox for that when you set the device to an external or secondary monitor.

also how to you apply the vegas built-in deinterlacer just to specific events? it seems to work when i use that (i have never however used smart deinterlacer and vegas' deinterlacer at the same time so it didn't appear to be that that was causing the problem) but yeah, is it possible to do the interpolate deinterlace method to just single events?

the method i'm using at the moment to get around this is to deinterlace all the 4:3 footage first, render that, and then pan and crop the render. so essentially the same thing but by hand - instead of telling vegas to do deinterlation before any other event modifications, i'm having to do it by hand. dunno why doing it 'by hand' works and vegas doing it itself doesn't...

but this method is long-winded and i'd like for this to work how it should, of course