SD Interlaced Footage for Flash Broadcast

[jbandy1]

I have a lot of old SD 4:3 interlaced footage at my job where more and more of our videos are going to the web. We make flv flash files and de-interlace the SD footage using Adobe Premiere Pro's Media Encoder. It works well and looks good but I was wondering what other people are using and what offers the highest quality encoding and de-interlacing for SD footage that is going to be streamed on the web. I can't be spending thousands of dollars either but what do you think? What are you using? The de-interlacing in important for me because any movement using our footage looks terrible when encoded to flash.

[poisondeathray]

Highest quality deinterlacing would probably be avisynth based methods, like tempgaussmc_beta1, mcbob, or yadifmod+nnedi2. They are much slower, but the quality is much much better, and free. Learning the basics doesn't take that long for your purposes (just a 2 line script)

AME is horrible for deinterlacing. Jaggies everywhere and it drops 1/2 the fields. The "jaggies" act to shimmer in subsequent frames and also act as "noise" which requires a higher bitrate to encode - counterproductive for the flash scenario

I would give the nod to x264 based encoders over AME, but it's harder to use and if you don't understand the settings your encode could end up with a suboptimal encode. AME accepts avs scripts directly if you have the premiere avs plugin

There are several deinterlacer comparison threads if you search, but DO NOT use AME for deinterlacing

Here is an illustrative example, notice the same frame doesn't correspond, because AME drops 1/2 the fields. Also the interpolation is very poor (there is none!), so you are left with jaggies:

AME


Yadifmod+NNEDI2