Premiere Pro NTSC VHS, Hi8, use upper field or lower?
 

Premiere pro NTSC-VHS, HI8 ... are they upper field or lower field first when editing and exporting for DVD?

Thanks

I am curious to hear what other users have to say on this issue. I find exporting MPEG-2 video from Premiere Pro as "interlaced" results in what appears as stuttering frames. My current workaround is to export MPEG-2 video as "progressive" but I am not certain if this setting interferes with image quality

There is a setting for what field order to export in in adome media encoder. You do have to make sure premiere knows what field order the source material is in though, the commonly used lossless video formats (huffyuv, lagarith, utvideo) don't have any way of letting an application know. If you are dealing with DV or mpeg2-encoded material, premiere should recognize it automatcially as long as the files are encoded correctly.

You do not want to save interlaced material as progressive in a lossy format like mpeg2, that will certainly create artifacts.

You are right Premiere pro is horrible at knowing what field order the files are. I always make sure to interpret the footage now.

Fields are determined by the capture card. And 99%+ of the time, DV=bottom (BFF), everything else is top (TFF).

Lossless AVI has no field flags. It must always be manually set. But even MPEG, MXF, and others must be verified when the project is created.

(The "fun times" begin when you have mixed-interlace sources, transport streams, TS. But that generally only happens when you directly download a broadcast stream, or work in the broadcast field. Been there, done that, hated those projects.)

Premiere is fine, not at fault.

Exporting uses MainConcept SDK. If you use something else on export, I've seen issues, experience issues in past years myself with 3rd-party encoder plugins.