Having trouble with probably an embarrassingly easy FFMpeg routine

[CursedLemon]

Hey guys, it's ya boi Lemon comin' at you with yet another FFMpeg hiccup, slap like and hit that bell

So I have some old DV videos that I'd like to convert with FFMpeg just because I wanna git gud with FFMpeg, no other reason. I could very easily accomplish this in VirtualDub but NO

The source videos are 16:9 DAR 29.97 (59.94) interlaced. I want to convert them to x264 square pixel deinterlaced videos (CRF 20 medium) presumably with yadifx2, and I also want to scale them to 1280x720 because for some reason Youtube treats SD videos like shit.

Can anyone help me map out this command? I feel like I'm having to enter the -vf argument three different times in the same command.

[Selur]

I feel like I'm having to enter the -vf argument three different times in the same command.

In never ffmpeg versions, that would give you a warning that only the last '-vf ..' parameter will be used.
simply bob deinterlacing with yadif (I would use bwdif instead) and scaling to 1280x720 is this:

-vf yadif=1:1,scale=1280:720

(note that depending on your source resolution and PAR you need to scale and letterbox to avoid distortions)
https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html is a good starting point in regard of ffmpeg syntax.

[CursedLemon]

Looks like that did it. You know what I was doing wrong? I didn't have a comma. lol

Thanks!

[Selur]

In case the container or stream aspect ratio of the output are not properly set, you might want to look at:
a. https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html#h264_005fmetadata
regarding the "sample_aspect_ratio" to make sure the video stream has the correct aspect ratio.
b. https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html#Video-Options
regarding "aspect" to make sure the container has the correct aspect ratio

Cu Selur