To De-interlace, or Not to De-interlace?

Okay, I'm just now starting to understand what 720p is and 1080i is. I mean, I knew what it meant, but now I really understand.
Progressive, and Interlaced.
So my question is this. I have analog video I captured from old home videos from 8mm and VHS videocassettes. I want to send it to iDVD and play it on my TV. I notice it looks much better on the old analog TVs, which are interlaced. And on my hi-def TV, these old home movies look like crap.
If I "De-Interlace" these videos, will I be able to watch old analog VHS videos on a Progressive TV without the quality loss?
Or is it just simply analog looks like crap on high resolution TVs because the footage is low resolution to begin with?
Thanks!

Most of the better progressive scan HDTVs will convert an incoming interlaced signal to a progressive signal before hitting the screen. So I'd say that it isn't the deinterlacing that's causing the poor image quality. Its much more likely that the TV is having to stretch the standard definition image (analog or digital) to fit the native pixel resolution of the TV.
An SD image is 480 pixels tall and an HDTV is either going to be 720 or 1080 pixels tall. So even if you have the TV is 4:3 display mode, the image will still be stretched vertically from 480 pixels to either 720 or 1080 pixels (depending on the set). That alone will make the image look softer than it should. And of course, since the original VHS footage probably wasn't all that great in quality to begin with, and it's now been highly compressed to DVD-Video for playback, it ain't gonna look all that great stretched.
-DH

Similar Messages

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    Choose the correct field order for your
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