Deinterlacing in Compressor

Question

Does Compressor 2.3 have ANY deinterlacing algorithms that are worth a crap? I'm trying to format some interlaced DV video for the iPod (On another note, we want more options and control in the iPod setting, Apple!), which means deinterlacing. Frame controls look good...if you have endless hours to dedicate to encoding, massive processing power, or your video is less than five minues. I started a 25 minute video overnight on Auto and when I woke up, it had 32 hours left to go. Setting frame controls to the lowest setting for deinterlacing goes faster, but produces poor quality. Using the old deinterlacing checkbox is pathetic as well. Odd and Even just toss out data, making the end result look like a blocky mess. Sharp doesn't get rid of all the combing, and blur is okay, except in scenes of high motion you get some really nasty ghosting instead of a healthy motion blur. Trying to do it in Quicktime produces shockingly awful video quality.
Now, there's a free program called MPEG Streamclip. The compression doesn't look quite as nice. It's very close, but not quite as good. However, the deinterlacing works very well and it compresses in a fraction of the time. Nice to see a piece of an expensive, high-end video suite get blown away by a piece of free software. Sorenson Squeeze's Odd/Even deinterlacing blow ALL of Apple's options and frame controls out of the water. It produced the highest quality of any compressor I've used. Sadly, I've only got the demo copy that leaves a watermark, so I really can't use it, and I don't have $500 to spend on it. Trying to deinterlace the DV file with JES Deinterlacer and then formatting produces lesser quality output.
So in the end, what's the deal with your deinterlacing algorithms, Apple? Compressor can produce good deinterlacining if you can wait for days on end, but that's utterly unacceptable. Am I missing something here? Anyone know if Compressor 3 has solved some of these issues?
1.83ghz Core Duo iMac 17"   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   2GB RAM

Answer 1

If you're doing this for your iPod and your video is at least twice as big as the iPod dimensions, here's what you do for perfect compression:
1) Add the deinterlace filter to every clip in your sequence. Do not apply it to a nested version, it needs to be the original timeline or an exact duplicate of it.
2) Duplicate the sequence and delete all the contents of the timeline in the new sequence. This is in order to make a sequence with identical settings. Now go into the sequence settings and change the aspect ratio and dimensions to whatever it'll be on the iPod, and also set it to PROGRESSIVE. Make sure to turn Motion Filtering or whatever they call it to Fast (Linear). Unless you know something I don't, you should probably turn this off in your original sequences too.
3) Now nest the deinterlaced sequence into the smaller sequence (drag the sequence file itself into the new timeline). I believe the scaling will be done for you but if not just fix that in the Motion settings, which you'll only need to do once since it's a nested sequence with no separate clips.
4) Render the entire sequence, and then Export as Quicktime Movie (NOT Export using Quicktime Conversion). INCLUDE Compression markers but DO NOT CHECK THE BOX about making the Quicktime movie independent (or something like that, I forgot what it's called, not at my PowerMac right now).
5) Put that Quicktime into Compressor, but edit your settings so that Frame Controls are OFF.
I left out a lot of the little details because I figure the above solves your particular problem. If you're worried the deinterlace filter is removing data, it's not. The temporal data is rendered by Final Cut Pro and the resolution, which would normally be halved by the deinterlacing process, is shrunk down to half-size or less anyway, negating the loss in resolution.
And no, you shouldn't have to do all this since supposedly FCP and Compressor work together, but it's the only solution I could come up with that produced pristine results and didn't take too long.