Understanding interlace on laptops and TV's.

[mark the newbie]

Obviously, I'm a newbie (hence posted in this forum) so please be gentle with me!!!

I have a whole bunch of DV video shot on my camcorder. I have edited it and would like to burn it to a DVD. However, when I convert to MPEG, and play it back on my laptop (with TFT screen) I see interlacing - evident from the scruffy lines on the edges of objects/people and more evident in sideways movement when the camera was panned. The original footage was fine.

I have read on this forum (and on other websites) about how interlacing works. I have followed all the instructions on setting up the rendering - and I understand that in fact it may be that the MPEG footage is correct but that it is only evident because I play it back on my laptop screen.

Is this assumption correct? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to check with a CRT monitor attached to the laptop because I don't have one.

To complicate things, I don't have a DVD writer yet - only a CD-RW. So, to try and confirm my suspicions, what I have done is to try the header trick and play a CD on my stand-alone DVD player attached to the TV. This is unsupported and I get awful sound but the video playback is smooth - no interlacing.

Can someone confirm my deduction that the current MPEG footage is OK, as long as it is viewed on a TV or CRT?

The problem is that I could do with the storage space at some point to edit more video - but I'm loathe to delete the original DV footage now to find out later that I need to start from scratch again... I was hoping to confirm that the MPEG edited files were OK, arrange them and create a DVD iso, then wipe the original DV footage.

On a sideline, if I wanted to distribute this to friends (who star in my home footage) do I need to adjust the MPEG and re-encode somehow for those with a laptop or new TFT-type monitor, depending on how they are likely to view it (PC or stand-alone DVD player)? And if so, can this be done from the MPEG files that I have already or does it need to be done from the original DV footage and within Premiere? This will help me decide whether I can clean the original footage off or not !!

I hope that this is clear. I think I understand what's going on here but I just need someone who knows what's going on to confirm my suspicions.

Many thanks for your time.

Mark.

[edDV]

Just keep it interlace and view it with Cyberlink PowerDVD which will deinterlace and rescale it for RGB progressive computer viewing.

The origianal YUV interlaced MPeg2 (encoded from Premiere) can later be burned to a DVD so that the video will play properly on a normal TV.

[adam]

Yes you should keep it interlaced unless it will only be played on a pc, in which case I think there are numerous deinterlace filters whose quality exceeds that of the realtime bob and weave routines that software players perform. But, as edDV says, as long as you play it back via proper playback software, you don't have to worry about interlacing on a pc monitor.

But, it sounds to me like you set your field order incorrectly. With DV sources, incorrect field order is usually only noticable during pans. Try using the opposite field order in your encoder and see if those interlacing artifacts go away.

[mark the newbie]

Thanks for the info - I'll try re-encoding, although I'm not sure it's a problem really since it wasn't evident when I did the header trick on the DVD player. I'll see if it makes a difference.

Other than that, I don't think it's a big problem.

I'll post again once I've tried it - and let people know how I got on.

Thanks,

Mark.