Greetings. I have a project I'd like to work on with FCP, and eventually author to DVD. Here are the specifics:
1) Extract 4:3 interlaced NTSC from a DVD (non-copyrighted home movie).
2) Deinterlace the stream.
3) Import into Final Cut Pro and edit
4) Re-author the edited content back to DVD.
Regarding 1, I have successfully used MPEG Streamclip in the past to demux to M2V and AIFF. This would be an option. Another option would be to transcode to another format. If I choose the second option, I am not sure what that format should be. More on this in a minute.
Regarding 2, technically, since the destination media is DVD I don't really need to deinterlace, but playback will definitely be on progressive TVs so I would rather have tighter control over the images during the editing phase. Here's the real problem. Final Cut and Compressor (and Streamclip for that matter) all offer simple deinterlacing options. I want to take advantage of more sophisticated deinterlacing techniques like the adaptive blending option in the JES Deinterlacer (
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jeschot/home.html#DEI).
I cannot find any such deinterlacing methods in Final Cut or Compressor that use both upper and lower fields like this. Perhaps Motion has something. I tried running JES directly on the M2V stream. Unfortunately, JES cannot output the video back into M2V, so I selected DV. The results were disappointing and the file was huge. I'll concede that my understanding in this area is still weak so perhaps I set the options wrong, or perhaps DV was not the right output format for my purposes.
Regarding 3, this is really the same as 1 and 2. If I am deinterlacing I will obviously need to re-encode. So what is the best format to encode to given that my source is DVD, I need to edit the content in FCP, and my final output is DVD - and I want to limit encoding artifacts to the greatest extent possible?
Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Mike
