A system, method, and apparatus for guiding a deinterlacer are presented herein. The deinterlacer is provided a deinterlacing coefficient which the deinterlacer uses to select a deinterlacing scheme which best utilizes system resources. The deinterlacing coefficient is calculated based on the various attributes associated with a macroblock of an interlaced field, such as motion vectors. Because the attributes are calculated and encoded prior to transmission of the macroblock over a communication channel, generation of the deinterlacing coefficient does not require significant additional computation resources.