De-interlacing question for v17

Hi everyone,

I am on the fence getting Resolve v17. I was editing in Premiere well over a decade ago, but just stopped at some point. Now I want to pick up where I left, which means I have tons of PAL DV (720x576 50i) material I want to work through.

My workflow in Premiere was to import the DV material, do whatever needs to be done and export it to DV again. This way only the edited parts were re-rendered / processed and the rest was untouched. So the final result had no degradation in quality due to re-compressing. This was very important for me, because I knew technology will advance and I wanted to store the material in the best way possible. I always convert it from there to something else (like mpeg2 for DVDs in the past or maybe mp4 in todays standards).

My old Premiere is not working on my current computer and Resolve looks like something I might like to work with.

I would love to have the same workflow in Davinci, but I do not know if it is possible due to the codecs supported.

My favourite way would be to just load the DV PAL material, work with it (intelaced) within Resolve, do my editing and export it in the same format again, hopefully that only the parts edited get re-rendered / recompressed.

From there I can run it through some post-processing I found in this blog (had to leave out the URL for some reason) which does a beautiful job converting the DV material to a progressive, 50 fps mp4 file.

But since I have read that there might have been some improvements in the de-interlacer in Resolve, I wonder if it still does only convert it to 25 progressive frames (at least that was my impression reading in the forums here) or if it will convert it to 50 progressive frames. If this is the case, I could skip the post-processing part and save me some time.

What I do not want to do though is having to convert my DV PAL material upfront to 50 progressive frames. This would make me lose my timecode information which is pretty useful when cutting the material.

So the real questions are:

1. How good is the de-interlacer and will it convert it to 50p or 25p when importing DV PAL material? I know v17 is very new, but i hope someone has some experience with it and can tell me how Resolve works with this material.
2. Will I be able to import DV PAL and export PAL DV withouth re-compressing with Resolve Studio or is it lacking the necessary codecs?

Thank you very much

The 'neural' de-interlacer in Resolve 17 is pretty good. It'll generate 50 progressive frames in the timeline, which you can re-interlace to i25 on output if needed.
You can read DV, but not generate it in Resolve. That's a very outdated codec with a bad quality/size ratio, why would you want it back? Internally, Resolve is decoding everything into a huge RGB 32 bit float space, so on output in nearly all cases you'll have recompression.

The 'neural' de-interlacer in Resolve 17 is pretty good. It'll generate 50 progressive frames in the timeline...

That sounds very promising, thank you very much. I placed an order for v17 yesterday, so I am looking forward trying how it performs and how it looks. The "freeware" conversion I did with multiple AviSynth Filters is phenomenal. If the result with Resolve is close to that I can skip a lengthy (because of CPU power needed) step

(DV)...)That's a very outdated codec with a bad quality/size ratio, why would you want it back? Internally, Resolve is decoding everything into a huge RGB 32 bit float space, so on output in nearly all cases you'll have recompression.

I don´t "want it back". But to me original material is the best to use for the future, because it is... original. Every bit is like it was created originally and on top of that I have the original timecode information in the files. That is why I asked.

Of course, when the result is "consumed", I will convert it to a modern format the target audience can play and I will also try to make the best out of the source material as possible (like the deinterlacing to 50 frames, colour correction etc.).

But once you altered the "original" source material and (I assume) converted it to another lossy format, you lock yourself out of every future tech which can improve upon the original. So I am happy I saved everything in DV (and as far as I know Premiere did not re-compress unaltered scenes) and can now benefit from new technology. That would be impossible if I saved it to mpeg2, which was "the thing" back then.

Thank you very much for your input, as I wrote I am looking forward to my v17 key and play with the new toy

Well, DV is pretty large given the resolution, but if you insist you could still keep your originals.

OTOH, you can get quite some improvement by grading it in DR, and then it isn't original anymore. Store a new master in a codec like ProRes 422 HQ and you'll never look back. I doubt any future technology will care for improving DV beyond what you can do now. Not saying that it can't be done (how would I know) but the is no market for it.

If you want to see what is possible today, try Video Enhancer AI by Topaz Labs. It's slow, but I was impressed at what you can regain. In natural structures it was achieving detail I didn't even know it was there. The de-interlacer added recently ain't bad either. For recordings very dear to you, it can be worth the wait.

OTOH, you can get quite some improvement by grading it in DR, and then it isn't original anymore. Store a new master in a codec like ProRes 422 HQ and you'll never look back.

True. Now that I learned that in Resolve the input material is internally handled in RGB32 and I can not "pass through" non-edited material in DV anyway, I looked up ProRes 422 HQ.
Unfortunately I am running on Windows and there it does not seem to be possible to export to ProRes. Adobe Media Encoder is only available for rent with other products and ffmpeg seems(?) to not really reach the quality of the original encoder. So I did some research and it seems that DNxHD and ProRes seem to be around the same level quality wise. At least not that far away that it should make a difference for my old DV material anyway.
But I saw that DNxHD only supports HD formats (720 to 1080). Here in the forums I found a post that DNxHR supports custom resolutions. Although that codec seems to be overkill for what I have, I have the impression that will be the way to go to keep the 720x576 resolution to "archive" my material after I cut it. Additionally I can still export / convert from there always into the format I want to consume the video.

If I got something completely wrong, I´d be glad if you correct me (if you find time to do so, I am very happy you took the time to respond to me so far ).

I doubt any future technology will care for improving DV beyond what you can do now. Not saying that it can't be done (how would I know) but the is no market for it.

Yes, you never know. A few years ago we found some Super 8 film rolls in the attic and to my surprise my Dad back then (over 40 years ago) already filmed in colour and we found footage from my childhood. We sent it in to a shop where they did a pretty good job digitizing the material. We were super impressed back then, but I am sure someone will do it better today (better colours, less "pumping" in brightness etc.). But that is analogue material, so probably in a completely different ballpark.

For my DV stuff, if the DNxHR route to archive the end result does not seem to be completely off, I think that will be what I should do for now (at least when my v17 license arrives in a few weeks, hopefully).

If you want to see what is possible today, try Video Enhancer AI by Topaz Labs...

Thanks for the advice! I looked that up, but for now at least that is out of my budget. Getting the v17 license was a big investment for me already, so I have to recover from that first, Haha. There are a lot of tapes in the drawer and I have no need to rush. I will re-learn what I forgot about editing and learn tons of new stuff (thanks to the learning material provided by Blackmagic, the forums here and a few very talented people on youtube) and then do tape after tape as I find time and want something relaxing to do

Resolve can do quite a few things in the Studio version to improve that digitised Super-8 too.

Regarding master format: there are Cineform and Grass Valley codecs in Resolve under Windows. They are as good as ProRes and can do standard definition. Maybe Cineform is the better choice, since it may last longer being open source now.

Regarding master format: there are Cineform and Grass Valley codecs in Resolve under Windows...

Awesome, Thank you very much! I read up a bit on Cineform (had the Grass Valley Codecs already on my System and played around with them), but Cineform looks like it has a bright future. As you say it is open source and there are not many reasons why a lot of devices and software will still support it in the future. It looks like this is the way to go for me.

Thanks again for all of your help, I appreciate that very much