[MEncoder-users] Trying to fully understand de-interlacing.

[Peter]

I'm the proud owner of a Sony HX5 digital camera, which is "OK" as a "nice" 
camera, but has a movie mode which blows away the competition, at 1920x1080/60i 
which I assume means that it produces fields of 1920x540, 60 times a second, and 
that pairs of fields are packaged into frames at 30 frames per second. (I hope I 
don't have my fields and frames mixed up.)

I see interlacing as a form of compression which was useful in the days of CRT 
screens, whereby the processing in our eyes would make us think we were seeing 
full resolution, full frame rate, even though only half the data rate was required.

I would like to make the best of this interlaced content, without discarding 
either the 60 frames per second, or the 1920x1080 resolution. I want the 
'impossible' holy grail of making a 1920x1080/60p file out of it. Of course, I 
will then compress the file with H.264, but at that point, I will let H.264 do 
its compression magic in a more appropriate and efficient way than the 
interlacing did.

To let H.264 make the best file, I want it to start with the best data; so I 
want to know how to make yadif create the best stream: neither discarding the 
time data, nor the resolution data, but interpolating the missing data in time 
and space in the same way that our eyes do when watching an old interlaced TV.

I realise that this is by no means an easy task. Stationary objects need to be 
interpolated spatially, and moving objects need to be interpolated temporally. 
Can yadif (mcdeint) do that?

I have been reading with interest, the thread "A good compromise for 
deinterlacing camcorder-dv-files" and it looks like yadif pp=ci is the best 
option. Is that right? will it produce a 1920x1080/60p stream?

Can anyone suggest a good command line? I have been trying to analyse Christian 
Ebert's suggestion of
-vf yadif=1,mcdeint=2:1:10,softskip
against what I take to be the manual at:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.txt
and it looks like yadif produces 1920x540/60p, and then mcdeint does the 
interpolation with mode=2 (slow) and parity=1 (is that telling it whether it's 
tff or bff?) with qp set to 10. (Quality???)

That manual page has no mention of pp=ci ???

-- 
Peter

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