A program that will tell me if something is telecined?

[fmctm1sw]

Does something like this exist? So I don't have to stumble through it and try to figure it out myself....

[MITSUI_1]

There's really no specific program that can figure it out.

If you're dealing with DVD source, run it through DVD2AVI on "preview" mode with forced film off, and see what the statistics window says.

If its captured material, open it up in virtualdub or some other viewer and advance the film a frame at a time. If its telecined, two frames out of every group of five frames (assuming reasonable action on the screen) will exhibit "combing" effects.

If its a downloaded file and still 29.97 fps, but you cannot see any combing, that usually means someone has done field deinterlacing. (a bad thing). They either blended the telecined fields together, or they disgarded an entire field. In the former case, stepping through an action sequence will reveal two "blurry" frames out of every five. In the later case, a step-through will reveal a duplicated frame among every five.

Hope that helps.