I have 3 different "exact" source properties, but the same thing happens on all of them.

1. 1920x1080x24, h.264, 30fps, upper field first, 1.0 PAR
2. 1920x1080x12, AVC (MPEG-2), 30fps, upper field first, 1.0 PAR
3. 1440x1080x12, MPEG-2 (HDV), 30fps, upper field first, 1.333 PAR

The project properties are set to match the 4th camera.

4. 1920x1080x24, h.264, 24fps, progressive, 1.0 PAR

Trying to get footage from cams 1, 2 and 3 to match, as closely as possible, to the footage from cam #4.

I had thought, as you seem to, that it was a simple matter. But I opened a new project -- set to the properties of the set of clips I was going to be re-rendering -- and rendered using the Quicktime template. The footage from the 4th camera is .MOV, so it makes sense to me to try to match that as well. I set the render settings to 'progressive', but the clips come out as 'upper field first'.

Vegas Pro 8.0c doesn' have h.264 as an option in the Quicktime template. I tried other options, but wound up with files vastly larger than the originals. The MPEG-4 compression seemed to give me a good quality image and a file size only twice as large as the original. But try as I might, I can't get it to give me progressive.

To answer your question about destination -- the destination for these files is to be put into the project with the files from camera #4.

Originally all these different files were in the same project, and we were encountering render freezes that we just could NOT find a remedy for. I finally isolated the problem as typically occurring when the render hits a transition from a progressive clip to an interlaced clip. The solution seemed to be to render the interlaced clips as progressive.

As MV said..what's the destination? If BD, then it will need to be interlaced anyway.

Final destination is DVD.

I don't want to go through a whole litany of why I need to do it this way. I just need to find out why my renders are showing up as interlaced when I have the rendering properties set to progressive. Not meaning to be rude, I'm just up against a wall here.

Hmmm... Since your final output is a DVD, which only allows for interlaced, it would make sense to rather go the interlaced route.

In a case with many different file formats and a mix of interlaced and progressive, I always use an intermediate format like Sony MFX. I choose either interlaced or progressive depending on the majority of the source material, in your case it would be interlaced. I would go that route even if I want to make a progressive file later as there are many good and quite simple ways to get excellent progressive output later.

Getting interlaced footage converted to progressive is fairly simple and I am not sure why you are facing such difficulties. It is just a matter of setting the render template to upper or lower first and also the project template, I usually go for the "interpolate" setting.

If you set the deinterlace method to either blend fields or interpolate, but render to the widescreen DVD Architect template, Vegas will do the following: Split the even and odd fields of the HD footage into separate images. Resize these two images separately. Then refold the two images by even and odd lines into a DVD sized interlaced final render. This is in fact usually the best solution. The motion is smoother and the image looks equally sharp.

When you are going from HD interlaced to SD interlaced, it makes no difference whether you choose the blend fields or interpolate options because it isn't actually deinterlacing. It is really important that you select a deinterlace method though. If you don't select a deinterlace method, Vegas will resize the interlace comb directly which leads to all sorts of aliasing artifact issues which look really horrible (wavy lines at the edges of anything that is moving).

"I've spent 2 days using batch rendering to render the progressive clips out using the Quicktime template, MPEG-4 (which I custom created, set to 'Progressive') -- but the resulting rendered footage still shows in Vegas as "Upper field first".

You said that you were rendering your files out for use on a DVD. Why are you using a Quicktime template? The DVD spec requires both elementary video, and audio streams as input to the muxer to be combined with all the other DVD streams such as menu sub-pictures, subtitles, alternate audio or video angles, etc. It would be better and faster to render your video directly to a video only .m2v mpeg-2 stream; and your audio to a Dolby .ac3 stream. Anything else, has to be demuxed and remuxed into these formats by DVDA before they can be used. The conversion step by DVDA may be where your settings are being changed.

This is one of those things that overthinking it will get you in trouble. If you didn't worry at all: just stuck your interlaced and progressive 1080 footage on the timeline with the default HD project settings, edited, and rendered to the DVD Architect video and AC3 audio templates, you would get great results.

NO! That's NOT what I said. Please listen!

I just want the answer to one simple question.

Why are my interlaced clips not rendering out as progressive?

I use the Quicktime template -- MPEG-4 -- and set it to 'progressive'. So why are the resulting clips not progressive?

Can anyone answer that question for me?

"This is one of those things that overthinking it will get you in trouble. If you didn't worry at all: just stuck your interlaced and progressive 1080 footage on the timeline with the default HD project settings, edited, and rendered to the DVD Architect video and AC3 audio templates, you would get great results."

No offense Laurence, but don't you think that's the FIRST thing we did? And if we HAD gotten great results, I wouldn't be here trying to find a fix for the problems.

How did you set your project properties deinterlace method? It has to be either interpolate or blend.

I think what many here don't understand is why you chose to go the Quicktime MPEG-4 route? If you want to use MOV files use DNxHD which IMO gives you much better results. Anoher option is to use YADIF plug-in to get very good progressive from interlaced.

If did test what you are trying to do. I have interlaced .mov files created from HDV footage using the DNxHD codec. I rendered those to DNxHD to try out using Handbrake for the deinterlacing. Anyway, I have no issue getting a progressive video rendering with Quicktime MPEG-4.

I have so little time, I can't waste any of it explaining the whys or exploring all kinds of things that maybe would have been better to do. This is where I am now, and I don't have time to scrap everything and start from the beginning.

Bottom line is -- I am not able to make progressive files out of these interlaced files using the Quicktime (MOV) template in Vegas Pro 8.0c.

I appreciate the help -- I truly do! And I don't mean to sound short, but I'm out of time. I didn't start this project, someone else did. I'm just trying to fix it so they can finish it on their deadline.

Thanks for understanding.

I think what's confusing us all is, why mp4 if you're going to DVD? It'll just be re-rendered anyway. Are you saying that rendering with the DVDA WS template for DVDA set to 'progressive' doesn't produce progressive??

Because the resulting files will be put into the existing wedding video project. There they will be trimmed, have effects added, etc. Then the entire project will be rendered to DVDA to create the resulting wedding video.

Why are my interlaced clips not rendering out as progressive?It is too bad that you don't want to accept the excellent help being offered, but since you just want an answer to what is probably the wrong question, here is that answer:

Your clips almost certainly ARE being rendered as progressive, and you are being misled by reports in Vegas and Mediainfo.

The reason for this is that Vegas and Mediainfo use the header flag in the video file to determine if the video is interlaced or progressive. The encoder used for rendering sets the interlaced flag, but that flag has nothing to do with how the video is actually encoded.

The only way you can know if video is actually interlaced or progressive is to separate the video into its upper and lower fields (thus halving the height and doubling the frame rate) and looking at the motion between fields. Progressive video will have no temporal motion between fields whereas interlaced video will have that motion. If you want to post a short render that is supposed to be progressive, but which you suspect is still interlaced, I can take a look at it and can probably tell what is going on.

Finally, since your end result is going to be on both Blu-Ray and DVD, you are doing absolutely the wrong thing by encoding as progressive. Some people don't seem to understand this, so let me be clear: changing interlaced video to progressive will ensure that you lose half of all your temporal information. If I suggested that you reduce all of your 1920x1080 video to 1280x720, thus throwing away half of all your spatial information, you'd dismiss my suggestion as being a really bad idea. Throwing away temporal information is doing exactly as much damage to your video as reducing the pixel count.

The three pictures below show my point. The original video is 1440x1080 HDV interlaced. The first two pics show two adjacent fields from a clip that was rendered with the field flag set to progressive. The clips are squished vertically because when you look at one field at a time, all the pixels from the other field are discarded, and the video is only half as tall as usual.

The key picture is the third one which is taken from the same video, rendered using the same settings except that the interlaced setting has been changed back to the (correct) default which is interlaced, upper field first. Note the position of the ballerina's foot is halfway between the two progressive frames. That visual information has been totally discarded by the process of converting to progressive. It is gone for good: that visual information is now totally missing.

You have degraded your video.



Bottom Field (progressive render) (note back foot position)


Next (Top) Field (progressive render) (note back foot position)


Intermediate field which has been discarded in the progressive render (note back foot position)

So, if it were me, I'd do exactly what has already been suggested: put the video from your various cameras on the timeline; set the project properties to match the format that you think will be used the most (this affects preview speed, not render quality); and then render to DVD and Blu-Ray using one of the standard DVD Architect templates, changing only the average bitrate, and NOT changing any of the field settings.

You don't have to scrap anything or start over: you simply change this setting when you render.

My PC that ran V8 died some time ago so this advice might not be relevant to your situation.

Firstly Vegas has always had issues with the .MOV container as it seems it uses Quicktime to decode it.

Secondly what others have said above is correct. Just because a header says the contents is interlaced doesn't mean it is. Pretty well all DVDs are interlaced and yet the content shot on film very clearly isn't. To get technical the content is Progressive segmented Fields.

If you want your content to be read by Vegas as Progressive then you need to use a container that supports it. Both MXF and MP4 support this but I'm not certain which version of Vegas it was that introduced the option to render to these, I think at least one of them was available in V8. Note that the underlying codec is mpeg-2 but at a high bitrate, the files will be larger and very noisy H.264 footage may suffer from being transcoded.

I suspect converting ALL your footage to the one codec and container will give you the most smooth crash free editing experience.

As for the general question of going from interlaced to progressive using Vegas, there are not many great options in V8, V10 is much better because it supports OFX and the OFX port of YADIF does a pretty good job of de-interlacing. The only alternative available in V8 would be Mike Crash's Smart De-Interlace which is free and does a reasonable job but no where near as good as YADIF.

In your case I'd not worry about de-interlacing at all, I fear even once you manage to do what you think you need to do your problem will still be there to bite you. Much better to render your Progressive footage as PsF, keep your interlaced footage as interlaced and get all footage in the same codec / container.

Bob.

A DVD is MPEG-2. The templates are in Vegas.
Quicktime libs won't make a dvd, won't render h264, won't always render progressive, or anamorphic, or non-mod 4, and it is generally broken in Windows (by Apple, not Sony).
So if I tell you to watch out for booby traps (2nd post from top), and you step into one, whose responsibility is that?
;?)

"The reason for this is that Vegas and Mediainfo use the header flag in the video file to determine if the video is interlaced or progressive. The encoder used for rendering sets the interlaced flag, but that flag has nothing to do with how the video is actually encoded. "

John, why would an encoder not correctly set the flag?

OldSmoke said, "Hmmm... Since your final output is a DVD, which only allows for interlaced, it would make sense to rather go the interlaced route."

I do not understand this. I shoot progressive, render progressive and burn to SD DVD progressive all the time and it always works.

I know it was different for Blu-Ray. I say that because I have a new Wizard of Oz Blu-Ray DVD that is 60p. Says so right on the box.

Please explain and thanks.

John, why would an encoder not correctly set the flag?Because some are hardwired. Best example is DV: it knows nothing about progressive because the codec is hardwired to work with DV tape and NTSC or PAL interlaced video. I use the MainConcept DV codec all the time in my film work because, like the Sony Vegas DV codec it has almost no loss and the resulting renders play back on the timeline so smoothly. The MainConcept codec lets me render using frame rates other than film, PAL, and NTSC. As a result, I often render at 15, 16, or 18 fps, and these are always progressive. However, the header flag is hard-wired to always read interlaced despite the fact that, because the source is movie film that I've transferred myself, there is no temporal difference between the upper & lower fields of a given frame. So, when I bring these back into Vegas, I use a script to set all the media to progressive, so that Vegas does the "right" things with the video.

[edit]Here's a link to a short DV clip that shows what I'm talking about. If you drop the clip onto MediaInfo, it will report it as interlaced. However, if you use the trick in Vegas to deconstruct the frame into individual fields, or if you run it through AVISynth and do a "separatefields()" command, you will see that there is no movement between upper and lower fields.

23.976 progressive video, incorrectly marked by codec as interlaced

BTW, that is me, forty-four years ago, making the tackle ...

Quicktime has a long history of misreporting various parameters in Windows, even in Mediainfo. It's a subject that gets discussed again and again on other forums.

Rendering a lossy interframe intermediate in any container, as the OP seems compelled to do, is a lot like p*ssing into the wind; it will always come back to you. One reliable solution of course, is DNxHD, but I have a nagging feeling the OP is just not ready yet. . . .

VidMus said,

I was wondering about this too. I'm pretty sure you can do 24p on DVD and all manner of progressive frame rates on Blu-ray.