Posted by: Grumpy1
My vids are all p, what does that mean as opposed to i and I don't know exactly what that means either.
Progressive scan means that a frame is sent all at once, one line after another. Interlaced scan is when a frame is sent as two "fields," typically one field of even lines and one field of odd lines. One field is sent, line by line, to the TV, and then the next field is sent, line by line, to the TV.
Suppose we had a video format of only 6 lines. In 6p, the lines would be sent 1,2,3,4,5,6. In 6i, the lines might be sent 1,3,5,2,4,6, or 2,4,6,1,3,5, depending on if it's an odd-first or even-first video standard.
The motivation for this has to do with flicker in CRT displays; when video standards were being established, CRT's couldn't receive and scan lines very fast, and scanning an entire 480-line frame would have taken about 1/30th of a second. If it was scanned all at once, the screen will do this 30 times each second, which is noticeable to the eye. Instead, they opted to get 480-line images (they didn't want to use lower vertical resolutions) by scanning 240-line "fields" 60 times each second. Which does unfortunately introduce several artifacts, most notably combing, which is exactly what it sounds like; it's not so bad on natively-interlacing CRT's (not because it doesn't exist, but because it's more natural and less noticeable on them, though it's still annoying), but natively-progressive displays don't handle combing very well. Check out DollarPwnCenter's section at the beginning of Trinity; all those horizontal lines? THAT is how bad combing is on progressive displays.
I don't know what that means either, lol. How do I make sure because I have several lines running across the screen and it bugs the hell out of me.
Looked carefully at your ghost launch, I don't see any interlacing artifacts in it. Either you're receiving over component or HDMI in a progressive format, or your system deinterlaces well.
What I do see is some screen tearing, which is the annoying horizontal cutoff happening midway down your image. I suppose that might happen because of too-high capture quality; I would certainly recommend doing less than 1080p in any case, since your source video isn't rendered that high anyway, and so you aren't really getting more quality out of it. Try capping at 480p and 720p and see how it looks; even 720p should more than halve the number of pixels your system is recording, and should look as good. It might not fix the problem, but it's worth a shot.
One other comment, though: what aspect ratio are you compiling videos in? It looks like you're having Halo 2 render 16:9 widescreen, but your videos on youtube are squished to a skinnier ratio. If anything, that's a larger issue than your screen tearing.