As a say-goodbye to my old Windows PC (Hello Apple!), here’s an article that describes how to produce supersmooth high quality deinterlaced compressed video in Windows.
First things first
Let’s say you’ve filmed some stuff. It’s sitting on your camera and needs to be put on your computer. Make sure you don’t compress the video at this stage. Re-compressing compressed source video is every self-respecting video maker’s worst nightmare! Capturing your footage as DV will be fine. Although DV is a lossy format, you’ll barely notice with it’s 25mbps bitrate. If you have one of the new Sony cameras, don’t worry either. Although it records Standard Definition video in highly compressed MPEG-2, the quality is awesome. I have a Sony HDR-SR7 myself and I’m really happy with the quality it delivers.
Source video
I always start with checking what source video I’m dealing with. I use Gspot for that purpose. Make sure your project settings (PAL/NTSC, resolution, framerate, field order, aspect ratio) in your NLE system match your source video.
Exporting your project
When your editing is complete, you need to export it for further processing. When working in Sony Vegas, use the “uncompressed avi” template to get a lossless, interlaced video file again. You can adopt your project settings as your export settings. Exporting your project as an uncompressed avi video file will leave you with an enormous file, depending on the length of your project, so make sure you have some free space on your hard drive. An alternative to this uncompressed avi template is the HuffYUV codec (a compressed lossless format). Using other editing software? Google is your friend.
Deinterlacing
Next up is the deinterlacing process. Read everything you need to know about (de)interlacing here. I’m using “method 4b” a.k.a. “bob+weave“. Essentially, this technique separates the two sets of interlaced fields yielding a video of twice the original frame rate. This results in supersmooth 50fps (frames per second) (progressive) video, which is pretty neat (59.94fps for you NTSC folks). As described at 100fps.com, you’ll need VirtualDub and AviSynth. You should end up with another uncompressed file at the end.
Compression
Finally, we’re going to compress the deinterlaced 50fps (or 59.94fps) video with H.264 and the audio with AAC. I use Quicktime Pro to do this. Open the uncompressed, deinterlaced file in Quicktime Pro. Hit File -> Export and choose for the option “Film to MPEG-4″. The custom options pretty much speak for themselves. Higher bitrate = better quality = bigger file size. As an alternative, MPEG Streamclip is free and will do just as good a job. Have a look at The Void’s tutorial.
Other options
Of course you could go for DivX or XviD as your video codec. They are a bit faster, but they’re not nearly as good as the quality/filesize ratio H.264 delivers. Ditto with the audio codec. MP3 and WMA just don’t match up against AAC.
Here’s an example (right click, save as) to get an idea what it looks like. It’s one of my submissions for the Diabolo.ca 2007 Collaboration Video.
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