remove interlace on tv movie

[syeager]

I captured a TV movie that applied tecline conversion from 24 fps to 29.97 fps. I rendered the movie to standard DVD specs and burned it to a disk. Watching it, it looked terrible. The tecline made everything look terribly interlaced. Anything that moved was full of horizontal lines. I Used Avidemux to apply a inverse tecline routine (one that decimated the extra frame and another that duplicated the 4th frame). I burned these to disk and watched them. They look much better, much better. However, it has a kind of jerky motion. It is not so obvious that everyone complains but it is wrong- not smooth.

So, my questions are:
Why is this look so jumpy? Is it the 4th frame duplicated? Or something else?
I could use the inverse tecline decimate, which converts it to 24fps. Can I burn this to disk and play it on my DVD player? What does it do to work on an NTSC TV? Does it reapply the tecline interlacing? Does it play 24fps well? At all? What is the appropriate or best way to handle these movies?

[jagabo]

If you captured properly and burned the DVD properly the output from the DVD player would have been exactly the same as what was originally broadcast. So you made some mistake in your processing. From your description, "The tecline made everything look terribly interlaced", I suspect you cropped and/or resized the video which destroyed the relationship between the two fields.

There's no need to deinterlace or inverse telecine although the latter will give fewer MPEG artifacts with the same bitrate, or allow you to use a lower bitrate. But it's generally more trouble than it's worth. Unless it's done perfectly The result is jerky -- as you've discovered.

If your original capture was 720x480, you should leave it at that and burn to DVD without resizing. Otherwise, post the details of your capture file and maybe I or somebody else will be able to help out.

[syeager]

I am using ATI MMC to capture 704x352 mpeg at about 20Mbs. I use either TMPGenc Plus or Amidemux to render it to 704x352 at vbr 9000kps max. I do not alter the field order and without filtering, it looks smooth (in motion anyway) and normal. The awful interlace look has been described on this site as tecline 2:3 conversion from 24fps to 29.97fps. When I view the unfiltered results on my 36" TV, it looks awful. If I inverse tecline the movie, it looks better for the interlace issue, but is somewhat jerky - better than the interlace image but still unacceptable.

What can be done?

[jagabo]

I am using ATI MMC to capture 704x352 mpeg at about 20Mbs.

There's your problem. NTSC DVD only supports 720x480, 704x480, 352x480 and 352x240. So your video is being resized during the conversion to DVD, destroying the relationship of the two fields. In the future you should capture at 704x480 so the video isn't resized.

You may be able to salvage what you have. I suspect you captured at 704x352 because you were capturing a letterboxed film. If that's the case, what you've done is cropped 64 scanlines off the top and bottom of the original 480 line frame. If you add those scanlines back (by adding black borders) you should be able to create a proper DVD.

Convincing TMPGEnc to do this may be difficult. I'll see if I can figure something out. It's easy to do with AVISynth or VirtualDub. You could use those to frameserve to TMPGEnc.

<edit>
The fix may be easy in TMPGEnc. Go to Setting -> Advanced and change the Video Arrange Method to Center. Also be sure Video Source Type is set to Interlace. I don't know if your video is top-field-first or bottom-field-first so try both. Set the output video to 704x480, interlaced, and the frame rate to 29.97.

All that assumes you simply cropped 64 scanlines off the top and bottom while capturing. If you did something else you'll have to address it differently.

[neomaine]

syeager,

And your not capturing with MMC directly to DVD specs because......?

I get excellent results. A quick trip to LordSmurf's sight should help with the basics and then some. Its pretty straightforward stuff.

[syeager]

OK, I was very tired when I wrote my post. Sorry for the glaring error. I captured at 704x480, which is, as you say, DVD compliant. But the original question stands. How do I remove the telecine interlace effect and still make the video play smoothly? What do I do with ~24fps video clips that I want on a DVD?

[manono]

How do I remove the telecine interlace effect and still make the video play smoothly?

You IVTC it, if it can be IVTC'd. However, if it was captured properly, even if left interlaced, you shouldn't see any interlacing when played to an interlaced TV set. And if played on a progressive display, it will either be deinterlaced, or IVTC'd on the fly if the player is capable of that. There's no way you should see interlacing artifacts, unless perhaps, you encoded this 29.97fps interlaced source as progressive and then played it on a progressive display, such as a computer monitor or HDTV. Or unless, as jagabo mentioned earlier, you managed to destroy the field structure.

What do I do with ~24fps video clips that I want on a DVD?

Video encoded as 23.976fps progressive has Pulldown applied, either during the encoding or afterwards, before being authored for DVD. That way, even though 23.976fps progressive is encoded, and then stored on the DVD, it outputs 29.97fps interlaced.