Is this de-/in-terlacing?

[midimidi]

We recently bought a DCM from vitec (vitecmm.com) and I'm noticing in the captured video the following anomolie. I have an image included below. The original source is s-video being streamed into the DCM card.

This is a cut from a video - it has not been enlarged or compressed (other than jpeg I guess). The video is DVD-compliant -- MPEG-2, 720x480, 8000kbps. This is the tassle of a person's hat as she is turning, and you can see noticeable horizontal lines. Is this normal of mpeg-2 video? i.e. you don't usually see something like this in a commercial video.

There are some other settings here, and I started to read up on them, but didn't quite understand it all...

Reference Pictures Distance = 3
GOP Size = 12
Closed GOP's - checked
Scene change detection - checked
GOP Coding Type - IBBPBBPBBPBP

I suppose the ending format would be all of the above - mpeg-2, playable on both set-top/TV and computer monitors.

Thanks ahead of time for the replies!

[racer-x]

Yes, that's interlacing. If you watch that on TV, it will look normal. Also, if you open the MPEG file in PowerDVD, it will de-interlace it so you won't notice the lines. The commercial video you've seen was probably progressive.

[SLK001]

Is this normal of mpeg-2 video? i.e. you don't usually see something like this in a commercial video.

This is normal of most NTSC video (only with true 30fps video will you not see this - live events, sports, etc.), and you will see this on a commercial video also.

Since this is a capture, PowerDVD will display it as 30fps, since there are no flags to tell it otherwise. You can perform an Inverse Telecine (IVTC) if you re-encode your capture, which will remove the duplicate frames and thus the lines.

[midimidi]

very helpful thanks!

what software would be best to use to re-encode it with Inverse Telecine? something freeware pref. of course

i'm assuming also, that if i throw this into real producer, the lines will still be visible, thus, i should probably re-encode it with Inverse Telecine?

[SLK001]

The lines are only visible on your computer screen, because the persistance of the phosphers is very short - on a TV, the persistance is much longer, so the lines are not visible.

However, if you want to experiment, try frameserving your video with AVISynth to your encoder with Donald Graft's DECOMB filter suite (which contains TELECIDE and DECIMATE filters). That's a mouthful, huh? Read some of the posts on frameserving here to learn what is possible.