What is Field Rendering, and can I Change to Field 1 Editing in EditDV?

An explaination of what the terms Field dominance and Field Order mean and how they relate to EditDV, transcoding and DV in general.

Let's simplify this a little:

Field dominance relates to a conventional stream of interlaced fields that follow one another, as in broadcast TV pictures. It decides where in the stream you pair together the fields to make frames, as related to edit cuts etc. Ideally the two fields that make each frame in the camera should continue to do so throughout the chain, and this is called field one dominance. It is now an official requirement in the EBU and I suspect US broadcast authorities as well.

Field Order relates to stacking two fields in a frame as used in digital video. The digital frame loses all the frame synchronising information present in the original signal, and since it can often start at a different point than the first active picture line, it is not obvious from inspection which is the first of the two fields. There thus has to be a convention, where the first line in the digital frame is said to relate to one of the fields. Unfortunately due to various historical events (some say confusion as to whether the first line should be numbered 0 or 1) there are supporters for both possibilities. The choice is usually stated as upper or lower field first as related to the first (upper) and second (lower) lines in the frame. Beware odd/even definitions due to the aforementioned 0/1 conventions. Also beware systems such as DV which are cropped (NTSC) from the full frame (486 to 480) and thus possibly losing an odd number of lines.

If you transcode from one codec to another there should be no problem if the transfer passes through an uncompressed state. There could be a problem if an attempt was made to transfer direct from two apparently similar codecs without the interim decoding. To take the example of After Effects, if the source footage is correctly Interpreted to separate the fields, then it can be re-rendered to any other order codec. If the source footage is not field separated then it can only be correctly re-rendered to a codec with the same field order. I hope this helps a little.