Why are my Photoshop images interlaced?

Question

Is that just an effect FCP throws into to make the progressive frames look like the rest of your footage, or is FCP actually interlacing my Photoshop files? I can run some tests and figure it out but if someone has a quick answer, it'd be much appreciated!

Answer 1

I was referring to:
"Spend some time learning what interlace means. Search it in the FCP manual, it's very good at that sort of thing.
Interlace is a very good thing - unless it's used poorly - which happens when it's misunderstood. It allows us to have very clean NTSC and PAL images with smooth movement, in very limited bandwidth."
But I'll readily admit that meaning can get misconstrued by text very easily, so no offense taken here, nor there apparently.
My initial problem was solved, but I've encountered a new one as a result.
What I'd like to is take the 1080i footage I have (six DVD set) and create a progressive video of half that size for the web (just a five minute promo). It's a bit smaller than half the source, and some scenes are cropped differently due to different needs for televisions and computer screens. I have an excellent video already working, but there are some improvements I would like to make (if it's possible).
I have two sources for the content in my video. One is the HDV camera (1080i), and the other source is the computer (Motion files, JPEGs, etc). Apart from the dissolve between the scenes, at no point is there a combination of these two sources within a frame. The scenes are neatly separated (each scene is a nested sequence).
What I want to do is deinterlace the camera footage. If I understand correctly, FCP's deinterlace filter is a line-doubler, halving the resolution but maintaining the temporal information. Because my output is half the dimensions of the source (give or take), this works perfectly for me because I'm losing that resolution anyway. Meanwhile, the scenes comprised of assets from Photoshop and the like are rendered at full resolution. To achieve this, I would think I'd deinterlace the sequences with interlaced footage, then nest the sequence in a new sequence which is smaller and without field dominance. Then, by nesting the sequences with non-interlaced assets, they are rendered at full resolution while the interlaced footage is rendered progressively because the parent sequence has been deinterlaced.
What's happening is that I MUST keep field dominance turned on in the downscaled sequence or the camera footage displays weird effects (like interlacing, but with alternating large sets of pixels rather than single pixel lines). This in turn interlaces the scenes with the computer assets, requiring me to deinterlace them as well, halving the resolution unnecessarily.
The only guess I have as to why this happens is that the deinterlace filter is being carried over to the downscaled sequence rather than already deinterlaced footage.
So, having said all that, the simple version of the question is:
How do you create a progressive video for the web from a larger interlaced version WITHOUT interlacing and then deinterlacing the portions of the video which weren't interlaced to begin with? Is it impossible to do this within a single sequence, and if so how do I combine multiple exported sequences into a single video for the web? Unfortunately I need to be able to cross dissolve from each scene to the next, so can I do that using Quicktime Pro, Compressor, or some other program?
I would show you the footage but I can't be putting links up to it on the Internet right now (not my choice).
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer and sorry we got off to a bad start.