Best way to de-interlace digitized video

Thank you, Matti. This is really helpful, but I have some questions as I am getting some odd results. I made a new project at 50p as I thought that doubling the frame rate should make it better quality. Is that correct? Anyway, I choose lower first and it looked very good in the timeline (upper does too, but stuck with lower anyway). When I output using the 1080p sharing preset, the resultant output is x576 h.264, but the output has combing, so not good. When I output the same clip using the 720p preset, the resulting file info says exactly the same thing, but for some reason, this file looks good. So I am not sure what is going on.

I then tried outputting again at 1080 lower first and it now does look good, so not sure what happened the first time. Maybe some glitch. I also tried outputting same at 25fps and the result was good and the file size was the same as 50fps, so that suggests to me that 50fps is not actually outputting more video info.

So this seems to be working, but can you please advise which of the choices you think is the best to go with? Thank you.

Oh, and I am still not understanding why on one project, when I switch from progressive to lower field, it makes the image cleaner, but the video run at half speed. Not sure why that is happening or how to fix that. This is the info about the video which is doing that. It's slightly different than the other one which is not.

That makes sense. So the 720p preset is only useful if the project is larger and you want to scale down, but 1080 will not scale up. Got it!

Any idea why using lower field is making my video run at half speed?

Okay, I just digitized the same short clip, so this is direct from the Roxio digitization without using any FCP output (I am so glad FCP dispensed with the superfluous X). See what you think.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nzsauw3snp7iju2/Sardinia%20test.mov?dl=0

Sorry for all the typos in above post. Not sure what I was drinking at that time. One other question. I am using the Roxio solution, but I find it a bit finicky and unereliable and I wonder if anyone has any better hardware options for transferring old videos into a Mac these days.

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to do that. Yes, I can see with my clip that Upper seems to work better. Not sure why the field dominance is unconventional. Some weird stuff with this video! What does it mean "bob"? I mean, I know what it means from your description, but wondered why it's called bob.

Yes, the Roxio does compress and this is set at best quality. That's why I am after a better solution which will transfer at a better compression, or uncompressed. My problem is that my Hi8 camera is PAL and I am in Canada, so I can't use an intermediate DV camcorder as that camcorder is NTSC. As such, I just need to find hardware which is like Roxio, but better. Since analogue video is a bit of a dead thing, seems there are not too many options.

The original video is PAL and I used Roxio DVD to VHS dongle to input and create an .mov file.

If the interlace will look annoying then what can I do to fix that? I thought it was to use progressive, but that didn’t look right.