Yes, I'm viewing on a PC.

I don't know if the source is progressive or not. The source was recorded with a Sharp Viewcam VL-E39U. I used a Sony video camera (forget the model) to play back the 8mm tape because this has an S-Video out. I have that connected to an ADVC-300 and captured using Vegas (6.0b) obviously.

Since there are horizontal scan lines showing in the original captured footage I'm guessing it's interlaced. If I'm actually losing resolution detail when rendering to progressive then I guess I shouldn't be doing it? I don't want to lose resolution detail.

8mm video tape would be interlaced source

Is it better not to render in progressive then?

Is it better not to render in progressive then?

If it's ONLY going to be shown on a regular TV, then stick to interlace.
Aything else (LCD, plasma, computer, etc.) and it's best to experiment and see what works best for that particular application.

Mike

Well that's the thing, I may not have a regular TV for too long. I'm trying to keep the long term in mind because once I have these digitized that's the way it's going to be for permanent archiving. As technology progresses and newer TVs keep coming out I want to know that the render I choose will continue to look good on future TVs or monitors. I may end up getting a plasma or LCD TV sometime in the next year or two. I have over 100 video tapes I have to put to DVD and it's going to take me years to finish this ongoing project. After I finish them all I don't want to have to do it all over again. I know someday DVDs will be phased out, but that's no problem because I can just rip the DVDs and save them onto the new format or chip or whatever else will come out after DVDs. I'm sure they will be backwards compatible to read the VOB and menu data as if it were a DVD.

I may have confused you with the post back in that thread you reference. If you are starting with film, you have a progressive source because each frame of film, when projected in a theater, is shown one frame at a time (i.e., the projector does not show part of one frame and part of the next frame at the same time). When encoding to a DVD, the DVD spec allows frames to be stored in progressive format. Since this requires fewer frames to be stored (by a ratio of 24/30) there are that many more bits available for each frame, resulting in higher quality. In addition, I believe (although am not entirely certain), that the encode is much cleaner when it doesn't have to deal with the the temporal shift that occurs between fields of an interlaced source.

Bottom line, as others have said, if your source is progressive, encode progressive; if the source is interlaced, encoded interlaced. Then, let your playback equipment do the conversion, if necessary. All DVD players can convert 24 fps progressive to 29.97 interlaced. If your set can display progressive, and your source is progressive, the more advanced DVD players can output the progressive directly and you can watch at 24 fps progressive. The only real question comes as to whether you would ever want to convert something that was 29.97 interlaced into some form of progressive, and then watch that. The general consensus (I think) on this forum is that this is a lot of work that provides very little -- if any reward -- because the result often looks "odd."

If you really want to get into this, go over the AVS Forum and have a look.

i rather doubt that , in fact I know it not to be the case .. (reply to msg about backwards compatability - i sure wish this forum was properly threaded !)

There's got to be. In 50 years from now when we're no longer using DVDs and I have all these 100s of videos that were put to DVD, I would think whatever media we're using by that time I should be able to store all the data from each DVD in it's own directory (because any new media will probably be much bigger by then and able to store dozens of DVDs in one package) and play each one of it's respected directory from the new media. I can't believe technology would leave all of us who have millions of home movies high and dry and have to convert each and every one of them again. That would be crap.

Media Player can already do this. If you have multiple directories on a disc with a complete independant DVD structure in each, you can open up one directory in Media Player and play it's contents just fine.

you are saying something different now -- you said before that you could reuse the menus and authoring structure - you will not be able to was my reply .

Yeah, I'm getting off topic now. I'm eventually going to make a new topic all about the future of our home movie DVDs. So, stay tuned for that.

So, I guess my question has been answered. If the source is interlaced render interlaced. If the source is progressive render progressive. Since my source is interlaced I guess I better stick with rendering it interlaced.

because any new media will probably be much bigger by then and able to store dozens of DVDs in one package

That's a pessimistic prediction. :O)

My current workstation has 1 million times more RAM than my first owned computer.

It has 2,000 times more memory than the largest mainframe I used back then.

So I think storing dozens of DVDs on disk/stick/whatever is not so far away...

Okay, I tried rendering out a video using progressive and compared that clip with a copy of the same clip rendered out in bottom field first interlaced. I can see the difference and the interlaced one looks much more crisp and sharp than that of the progressive. I know this may seem contradictory to what I said in my first post, but I failed to look at the footage with a side by side comparison.

Whoever said that my TV and DVD player do the deinterlacing for me is right because when I play back my videos on my DVD player I do not see those interlaced lines like I do on my computer monitor.

So that's that, I'm sticking with bottom field first interlacing and staying away from the progressive unless the source is progressive. I've been learning a lot on this forum. Thank you everyone for all your help.