This turned out to be the perfect solution. Method 4: bwdif - To quote the FFMPEG documentation: “Motion adaptive deinterlacing based on yadif with the use of w3fdif and cubic interpolation algorithms”. In theory, it does many of the same things, but to say that trying to figure out the options was confusing is an understatement. Method 3: nnedi - The method that QTGMC was designed to incorporate/replace. It did successfully deinterlace the footage, but ended up looking herky-jerky as a result of the field order mismatch.

Unfortunately it was originally designed for interlaced standard definition PAL content, and as such somehow does not have a mechanism for selecting Top Field First field order. Method 2: w3fdif - Developed by the BBC, this is much closer to what I was looking for. Method 1: kerndeint - a relatively simple deinterlacing method that automatically halves the framerate and is roughly on par with the old After Effects / Premiere Pro deinterlacer. Even after all that, it wasn't immediately obvious which method would be superior, so I decided to run a few tests. Normally, something like that would give results pretty quickly, but most of the substantive discussions were from at least five to nine (!) years ago or related to programs that use FFMPEG as a back-end engine, rather than as a standalone app. For example, trying to figure out the best method for deinterlacing involved me doing Google searches for each of the various methods. The problem with FFMPEG is that its documentation is enormous, and while it sometimes includes clear examples to show you how to use certain features, other times it's simply assumed that you're technically savvy enough to know what they're talking about. One of the reasons I looked into this is that QTGMC (my AVISynth deinterlacing plugin of choice) is ridiculously slow and prone to crashing when processing HD footage.

I've kept this post up mainly for archival value.Īfter my last post, I played around with bunch of different settings, and discovered that plain old FFMPEG can do decent deinterlacing.

Ffmpeg filter yadif