Aug 122014
Last week I had to build a watchfolder that converts an interlaced input movie to an H264 proxy using FFmbc. It took me quite some time to figure out that if you scale an interlaced video (with the scale filter) it automatically gets converted to progressive in this step. However as I further had to deinterlace it (with the yadif filter) this caused me some problems. This Google Search revealed a lot of useful information.
In the end I learned that whenever you work with FFmbc or FFmpeg on interlaced material that has to be deinterlaced you have to do that with the first filter. Here’s an example:
ffmbc -i Interlaced_Input.mov -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac -strict experimental -b 5120k -vf "yadif,scale=720:576" -y H264_Output.mp4
Happy Deinterlacing!