Compression and Deinterlacing

Hi, I have shot and edited together a 1080i short film shot at 25fps in FCP X with the project's properties accordingly set to 1080i. In order to prepare it for distribution - be it theatrical or on the internet - i'll need to de-interlace and compress the final product.

As a test, I created a new project, custom set at 1080p, into which I copy and pasted all of the clips that comprised my short film. Upon export, the master file had been successfully deinterlaced, and as can be expected in any case of deinterlacing, the definition of the film was somewhat diminished.

My question is, if I can perform both deinterlacing and ProRes/h.264 etc compression in FCP X, where does the great strength lie in pursuing this process through Compressor instead? Has it been established that Compressor offers higher quality compression, and deinterlacing than FCP X?

I looked around on a few forums, but didn't find any definitive answer to this question. Thanks.

As you have noticed FCPX does a fairly decent job with deinterlacing and format conversion. In fact FCPX and Compressor share exactly the same render engine. The settings you find in FCPX Share options are general settings for an optimized conversion quality/conversion time relation.

Of course you can get better results exporting a Master File from FCPX and doing the final conversion in Compressor, where you have access to far more controls you can tweak. But using these controls also requires experience and testing. Plus the higher you set the quality options in Compressor the longer it will take to encode your file. It's a matter of trial and error and of the time you want to spend converting your video. For most conversion jobs for the internet the general settings in FCPX will do fine.

- Ronny