Ars: Post-production at home.
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It's also necessary to check if the original footage is interlaced. If it is interlaced, a de-interlace filter must be applied during conversion. De-interlace filters usually have a quality setting, and the higher the quality the longer the conversion time. Very high settings can take up to 10 hours per minute of footage to convert, so using a medium quality setting is usually a good enough option, unless your final delivery medium is Blu-ray or a cinema screen. De-interlacing can be avoided if the original footage is shot in progressive mode on the camera, as long as the camera is capable of progressive filming.
It is easy to see how confusing this can all become. A good rule of thumb is to use a 4:2:2 color space in 8-bit on whatever intermediary codec your editing package supports. An intermediary codec un-compresses the resolution as much as possible without increasing file size too much. A popular codec on Mac is ProRes422; on PC, use CineForm CFHD (intermediate) set to 8-bit 4:2:2. These are great DVD post-production formats.
If your intention is to publish to the cinema screen or Blu-ray, then you'll have to work with an uncompressed 4:4:4 10-bit format, but to do so you will require a very powerful workstation with superfast HDDs and multi-terabyte storage.
If you intend to publish to mobile devices or the Internet, you can configure the intermediary codec with a smaller resolution than the original footage. Try a vertical resolution of 720, 640 or even as small as 270. This will work lightning fast on most computers and still provide a rich color space.
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It sounds like one still needs a ConnectionMachine to do this stuff at high quality in a reasonable amount of time. It looks like we need cheap dedicated deinterlacing and decompressing chips so it's not all done in software.
Cheers,
Scott.