If the footage is from a film (or any material shot at 24 FPS), then yes it needs to be inverse telecienced back to 23.976. Not kept at 29.97 nor deinterlaced to 59.94 as that results in duplicated frames. That's how the film footage was able to play by the rules of analog tape, by repeating frames.

If the footage was shot at 29.97 FPS (or if the 24 FPS movie footage is included with footage shot at 29.97i, so something like a documentary or TV broadcast with commercials) then there is no choice but to deinterlace when all the footage has different frame rates.

For YouTube, 720p and above preserves the new 59.94 frame rate (if the footage is deinterlaced, not inverse telecinced. 480p does not preserve any frame rate higher than 30.

But YouTube compression sucks butt for Standard Definition so it's best to upscale to 1920x1440 at most, I think so anyway.

YouTube will automatically de-interlace and conform to the proper pixel aspect ratio as long as it is correctly flagged in the uploaded file's metadata. I have uploaded many 4:3 and 16:9 interlaced videos at 720x480 and YouTube automatically de-interlaces them and scales them to 640x480 or 854x480, respectively. Obviously this is far from the best quality, especially since it won't give you the full 59.94fps frame rate, but it does work.

In fact, it will even preserve CEA-608 closed captions and display them properly, even including different colors. For example, on this clip, which was recorded from VHS using a Sony DVD recorder, ripped from the disc, and directly uploaded to YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlLXmW2PJUU

The default in Hybrid for x.264 is 1.5 Mbps.

x264 --preset fast --pass 1 --bitrate 1500

Is that where I should be setting it to 25 Mbps (25000)? I've done some basic side by side comparisons and I'm not sure I see a difference in quality but do get a much larger file once converted.

Hi, bringing this one up again as I'm making (slow but steady after 9 years!) progress.

Here's what I generally do with my VHS captures (AG1980 or HR-S9800U, DataVideo 3000 TBC, ATI600)
- Capture with VirtualDub 1.9.11 on XP, 720x480, losslessly compressed and saved.
- Moved to Windows 11 (monitor calibrated with datacolor SpyderX Pro).
- Check histograms, crop and add borders (vdub, avisynth)
- Adjust color, darks, lights with ColorMill (in vdub) and/or ColorYUV, Tweak, Levels (vdub, avisynth)
- denoising, degrain, sharpen - lallo's script (vdub, avisynth).
- Inverse Telecine or QTGMC depending on what I have (vdub, avisynth).

- If it's going to YouTube, upscale to 1920x1440 - lallo's script (vdub, avisynth).

- Hybrid to convert avi to x.264.

So, back to my year old question. Should the bitrate, which defaults to 1500 kbits/s, be set to 25000 kbits/s?
Obviously that makes the file much larger. So I want to be sure and am curious what others do here.

And yes, I plan to slowly convert to using Hybrid for many of the above steps. Just taking it one step at a time!

I would put the de-interlacing first in the chain after capture, unless you're absolutely certain that all of the post-processing you're doing is able to handle interlaced video with no adverse effects.

I thought the message about deinterlacing has always been to do it last, just before converting to internet or not at all since most modern players handle deinterlacing just fine?

I any case, any comments on the bitrate (1.5, 25, other Mb/s) to use in Hybrid when converting VHS to x.264 that has been upscaled to 1920x1440 for YouTube?

Deinterlace must be first due to some filters only working with progressive video.
Anyway bitrate would be 25mbps for 1440p at 60fps

I will double check the tools I use in avisynth. Thanks to both of you for pointing this out.