Should i use the "progressive" or "interlaced" settings rendering my MiniDV film clips? ?

Question

Sometimes when i render video that take from my miniDV Camera there are visible deinterlaced lines. What is the best way to avoid this?

What video format is best for video that will be made into dvd video (avi, Mpeg or WMV) and what bitrate is recommended for DVD use and future rendering?

Cheers

Answer 1

If you watch interlaced (as in 625/50i) clips on a computer you won't see it at its best due to the fact that the monitor screen will tray and display it as progressive scan (25p) and the jaggies you're seeing are the result of the interlacing artefacts. So, that's entirely normal and are not representative of the actual clips.

Once you render down the clip files to what they should be for standard definition DVD, which is MPEG-2, you'll find that they're fine when shown on a conventional TV.

Answer 2

Most miniDV video is interlaced. If you shoot normal PAL (720x576, 50 fields per second, interlaced) or NTSC (720x480, 60 fields per second, interlaced) you want to retain that.

A few camcorders offer an "24p" mode, which is probably actually a thing called "NTSCfilm" mode. Theatrical films are shot at 24 frames per second, progressive. To make easy transfers from film, there's a 23.976 fps format that's easily converted to NTSC... some camcorders, such as the Canon HV20 and HV30, can shoot this mode.

So basically, for most video editing, you want to indicate the format you're actually using in the video clips themselves. Rending will then pretty much take care of itself.

For DVD, the video modes I mentioned are each supported as standard DVD formats: if you shoot in PAL, render MPEG-2 in PAL, if regular NTSC, render to regular NTSC, if 24p, render to NTSCfilm formatted MPEG. Otherwise, you'll be counting on your PC to do interpolations and frame-rate conversions, which will add needless distortion to your video.

If you're rendering for computer video, you want your output video to be progressive, but you don't get there by telling the video editor that your DV is progressive... in fact, that'll work against you. What you want to do in most video editors for this is to enable de-interlacing, then select some kind of motion blur, like gaussian, for dealing with de-interlacing. Computer formats would be something like WMV, MPEG-4, Flash, etc. that don't work on most DVD players. If you're downrezzing for something like YouTube, you're not going to see much in the way of gnarly de-interlacing stuff anyway.

DVD bitrates are usually in the neighborhood of 5-8 Mb/s, but there's always a tradeoff between how much you'd like to fit on disc and your bitrate. Also, you pretty much always want to enable variable bitrate rendering for DVD... this allows the rendering engine to use lower bitrates where they'll look just as good, saving the higher bitrates for high motion video.

You can learn quite a bit about DVD and video rendering at http://www.videohelp.com. These days, there are books, plenty of other online tutorials, etc.  

Answer 3

Keep your footage in DV format for as long as possible.  The MPEG-2 compression used by DVDs is very lossy - you don't want to degrade things by converting from one very lossy format to another.

The bitrate is fixed - one thing less to worry about!  

Answer 4

yes

Answer 5

Where are you based? I ask because in the UK (Australia etc), we use PAL format which is interlaced. In America (Japan etc), they use NTSC format which is progressive.

The capture method is probably a factor in the lines. Assuming you're using Windows Movie Maker, have you tried something else. I get great results with Pinnacle.

Mpeg and WMV will compress the file using less disc space, at the price of slightly lower quality. It'll end up compressed when burned to DVD, so it's not a big issue.