Thanks Martin, but unfortunately it made no difference.

The interlace "squiggles" are on any vertical edge such as door frames, shot as I walked through my house. They are there on all PC versions of the footage, both the m2t and the Cineform avi, BUT they are not visible on the LCD when playing the tape back in the camera.

Now, I went to take a still to demonstrate, but when I changed Preview to Full(Best) the squiggle dissappeared! -

www.allroundvision.com.au/Interlace B.png

Whereas when preview is Preview (Auto), the squiggles on the same frame are clearly visible -

www.allroundvision.com.au/Interlace A.png

So, I still don't know if the artifacts are "really" there and caused by me walking around with the camera, or not.

Peter,
they're actually in both snapshots! First one is bad, second one is UGLY!
Try applying my old mate "Reduce Interlace Flicker", worked for me.
I've had lots of issue going from the CF DI to several different formats / codecs, so far I know this thing should be wonderful but to date it's been a real PIA for me.
Bob.

Yes, it's a tangled path Bob ...

I'm currently rendering to MPEG2 using "Best" instead of Good - I'll try the old Reduce Interlace Flicker after that - I've still got 5 days to find a good HDV to SD workflow before I take the plunge and use the Z1 for an actual job!

Peter

Most grief free path I've found is to let the camera / deck do it. Theory is you should get a better result using Vegas but there's only so much time available for testing before someone wants to see something. I thought I'd get more time to play with this stuff but paying clients keep throwing work at me.
I really almost could use having it work, I'm going to have to shoot lots of black things on a black background and I could use every bit of sampling I can find.
Bob.

Well, Rendering at Best made a considerable difference - now I'm adding Reduce Interlace Flicker and hopefully it will get even better.

This footage is literally arrive home with new camera, everything on auto, walk through the house and round the back yard, so there's lots of things to tighten up on.

Tomorrow I'll try letting the camera convert and see how it comes out.

I guess the other way is to actually shoot SD, but that seems short sighted - I really want to start in HDV for future purposes ...

It's good having all these versions on a DVD-RW so I can play 'em all and compare ...

Sounds like progress, let us know your workflow when you think youve got it down. The stuff I have shot in HDV Ive rendered out to wmv 720p and looks great. I'm gonna try the same project rendered out to DVD wide today.
Did you end up setting the field order to lower in the project properties b4 rendering?

I got the same issue, however, I am going from HDV/29.97 to DVD Widescreen /25. Thought it may have been due to the standard's conversion, but guess this is not necessarily true after reading the post - not had problems in the past with SD footage and standards conversion. Was going to try setting the project to DV Widescreen before rendering. Will let you know how that goes. Also had no issues going to WMV 720p.

Peter, first let me clarify something, just cuz it's early and you can prevent the habit....:-)
There is no such thing as PAL HD. It's 50i....silly nomenclature, but a fairly important one as we all start moving into a new paradigm.
For giggles, I just now shot some 50i and CF25 footage of a fence and panned to a post. If I simply down convert to PAL, I get the abberations you're mentioning. But, by keeping it in a 1080i template, rendering to a PAL template, using Reduce Interlace Flicker on everything (Ultimate S has a switch to do this to everything) and then rendering to Best, it looks great.
Is this your workflow?

Hm, I always use "best" as rendering quality so I really can't tell if that makes the difference.
"Reduce Interlace Flicker" will soften the image somewhat. You can compensate by adding a slight amount of sharpness.
Also "RIF" will smooth the HDV vertical resolution so much that the down-rezzed SD-image is practically not interlaced any more.
Just to be sure: how do you playback your SD video ? You *are* using a good deinterlacing playback software, right ? And we are not talking of MS Media Player here ;-)

Firstly, Peter is seeing exactly what I have also seen. Secondly, this is an ongoing issue in Vegas that I've had to deal with ever since I started using it.
I still cannot quite get my brain around what's going on but this isn't a typical interlaced artifact problem, the artifacts are WAY, WAY bigger than single scan lines. I think Peter and myself have been staring at the Vegas preview monitor for long enough to know what a NORMAL interlace artifact looks like. If that's all they were they'd be combs on vertical edges where the teeth were one scan line high. These babies are at least 10 scan lines high!

I'm suspecting it has something to do with how Vegas rescales. Let's say (just to keep the numbers simple) the frame is 1000 lines high, thats two fields of 500 lines. Now I scale that down to 800 lines, two fields of 400 lines.
So in each field 500 lines have to be down scaled to 400 lines except you cannot treat this 'field' as you would a simple still image in your rescaling because every second line is missing. You could attempt to interpolate the missing lines prior to rescaling or you could attampt to bring in data from the other field but then you're bringing in data that has temporal seperation.
Now I'm only guessing and my head is already starting to hurt but I think this is what the RIF switch does, it gives you the choice of either blending or interpolating the fields prior to rescaling. But here's another thought, we're also doing a field order reversal in this scaling (HDV is UFF, SD is LFF and DVD mpeg-2 is UFF), that means also there's a possibility that the fields are being blended in the wrong way!
And what really confuses this is it looks fine going out to WMV @ 720p.
If you're not confused yet, the issue doesn't seem to exist going from the m2t file to SD DVD!
I'll now go back to editing audio, thankfully no ones ever tried to intelace that!
Bob.

Yes, Bob, I've had this before, long before HDV, and as you say the "squiggles" are far taller than scan lines.

For now, though, rendering at Best with Reduce Interlace Flicker produces a satisfactory result, so at least there's a workflow to go with.

Thanks DSE - keeping the Project Template at 1080i is definitely the way to go.
Where/when do you change from Upper to Lower field first?

And Martin - I am rendering to Widescreen PAL MPEG2 video, and viewing on TV with a set top player - this is my output format for next week's job, so that's my first priority.

I hope not to spend the whole week trialling though - I have lots of editing piling up .....

I change the fields on render to the SD output format. Hope this helps.

Jeesh Douglas - you took more than a minute to reply!

- I guess it's getting late where you are ;)

Just got in for the night. :-) Long day of shooting, my eyes and fingers are tired.
Got some AWESOME footage of elk in rut, going at each other like nobody's business. Man, I wish I'd had a better front end...at 215mm, the Z1 lens doesn't *quite* reach out far enough, and 50 yards was close enough to be in a herd of 40 bulls that want to stick their horns in each other. Looking at the footage on a 12' screen right now, and dang! It feels like you're there again.

Truly a strange phenomenon - never have encountered it myself.

About changing field order: You could either keep the HDV-clips UFF and change the field order in the encoder or change all HDV-clips to LFF and go with the default parameters for the encoder. I've tried both a couple of times and didn't notice any difference (MPEG2 doesn't have a preferred method so UFF and LFF are both fine).

Anyway - the workflow you have now (edit HDV 1080i, change field order, ReduceInterlaceFlicker, render MPEG2 widescreen) gives the best results.

Don't forget to apply SecondaryColorCorrector(ComputerRGBtoStudioRGB) before rendering. Also try Sharpen with very small amounts and see if you like that better. The HDR-FX1 does very little sharpening and relies on it's high resolution to get a sharp image. When downconverting to SD the resolution is lost, of course, and some extra sharpness may come in handy.

... should be "ColorCorrector" instead of "SecondaryColorCorrector", of course...

The HDR-FX1 does very little sharpening and relies on it's high resolution to get a sharp image
The FX1 and the Z1 both can go overboard on sharpening, depending on where you set it on the cam in the menu. Set to 12 is about the optimum position. I'm varying between 11-13, depending on what peaking shows, and most of the guys I'm regularly talking to are locked in to that same range.