I just put them on Rapidshare. Hopefully these links work!
Field Discarded
Fields Separated
Interlaced
The process I'm using isn't really that bad. All the necessary software is free, and there is a lot of online support from other people who are doing the same thing. I would love it if there was a single button that sucked in anything on one end and generated a perfect file on the other end, but that seems to be a ways away. Some developers are trying, but none of them work right yet.
The hardest thing to learn is AVIsynth, but once you get your head around it, you won't be able to live without it. Fortunately it comes with some easy to understand documentation. It's just a headless frame server that runs in the background whenever a video program opens an .avs script. Video encoders and players see the .avs script as if it was a regular video file, like an .avi file. AVIsynth's entire interface is in the script.
For this particular clip, the script was pretty simple. Here's the entire script for the separated fields clip:
Code:
LoadPlugin ("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\DGAVCDecode.dll")
AVCSource("20081019105611.dga").SeparateFields()
DGAVCIndex, the program that makes the .dga file, is pretty simple. Just load the clip, and save a project file. That's it. You can think of it as the "import" function on one of those commercial software packages. Oh, and DGAVCIndex also extracts the audio as a separate file, which will come in handy later.
MeGUI is also pretty simple. You could think of it as a "Render to AVC" function. The .avs script goes in, and an AVC encoded .mp4 or .mkv comes out. You have to set up all the encoding settings just like you would with commercial software, but it comes with presets to get you started. Once that's done, you multiplex the audio that DGAVCIndex extracted with the newly rendered video, using MeGUI's MKV muxer, and you're finished.
This is the simplest process I've found using free software, and it gives me total control over the final output. The best thing about free software is that there are no limits or artificial constraints on what formats I can input and output, and nothing is dumbed down. I've been able to make some very nice files using this method.