Re: HD to SD downconvert - Best Results Inquiry

A few matters of confusion. Shift fields is happening because NTSC HD is upper and NTSC SD is lower. Nothing to do with centre cut versus letterbox.

Most broadcasters prefer 16:9 anamorphic (often called Full Height) This is automatically centre cut on analog broadcast and correctly displayed on digital transmission with a suitable 16:9 monitor. It is also correct for DVD.

Deinterlacing has nothing to do with downconversion. It is a look and should be thought about carefully. FCP's deinterlacing is poor and throws away resolution. Third party plugins like Nattress are better and let you control blend parameters shot by shot. Compressors deinterlace is also better than FCP but is global and not shot specific. Given the look of the program was meant to be 'home vid' I would not deinterlace.

By far the best downconversion is to use an external hardware device like Teranex, Kona cards or even the built in downconvert in the Sony HDCam decks. They all look better to me than Compressor and the worst is letting FCP render down. The shift fields issue is only happening when you drop the sequence into an SD FCP timeline. All the hardware options fix this automatically on the fly in real time.