Pulldown.exe error?

[defense]

Hi, I was just wondering if anyone knows if it is necessary to do "force film" on an NTSC Interlaced film? I have only used force film and then pulldown, on progressive films, or films that are both progressive and interlaced. The problem I had was that after I used DVD2DVDR and CCE to reencode this movie, I tried to run pulldown.exe as I normally do, but I got some error that said something about "don't use the spacebar for source file" and I couldn't run pulldown. I"m thinking that being that this was my first interlaced film, that is had something to do with that. If anyone can give me a little info or help on this, I would appreciate it. Thanks

[DEmberton]

"don't use the spacebar for source file" sounds to me like you've just got the pulldown command line wrong. Including spaces in your filenames perhaps?

[rogergl0]

I have had that "spacebar" problem. I copied my files to a new directory (i moved them all to c:\) and it fixed it for me. hope this helps

[defense]

thanks you two for the reply. Actually I didn't have any spaces in my filename and what is odd is the fact that this problem ONLY occurred on two movies that I tested and BOTH were "INTERLACED." I'm not sure why having the film be progressive or interlaced made a big difference, but it did. So I just reencoded the movie but DID NOT run force film on the "iNTERLACE" originals, and therefore, didn't need to run pulldown afterwards. I'm still curious as to why this ONLY occurred with "INTERLACED" films, but I received excellent quality by not running forcefilm/pulldown when encoding. I'm happy I got my result, but i'm just curious as to why I got that error on the "INTERLACED" films. I didn't think it made ANY difference whether a film was interlaced or progressive, as long as it was NTSC then it shoul dhave force film and pulldown run for the best quality. So far this has been true with progressive films, but not the Interlace. If anyone knows why, please let me know. Thanks in advance

[noobee]

if the source is INTERLACED, then we should not run pulldown on it.

FILM is 24FPS progressive, INTERLACED is 30fps interlaced. NTSC wants 30fps interfaced, so that's why we set the pulldown flag in a FILM data stream so that the decoder will apply telecine to it, which repeats fields in the 24fps stream to make it display at 30fps interlaced. if the source is already INTERLACED, then pulldown is not applicable as its data stream already contains all the stuff for 30fps interlaced output.

one implication of 24fps vs 30fps is that if the source is FILM, we want to keep it at FILM (via forced film, etc) so that the encoder has alot less data to work on for the same duration clip. hence, it'll be both faster and higher quality. but then we have to apply pulldown to tell the decoder to display it at 30fps instead of its native 24fps.

if the source is already interlaced and we cannot apply inverse telecine to it, then we are out of luck and have to encode at 30fps interlaced. so now the encoder has more frames to work on per second.

[defense]

thank you for clearing that up noobee. The last part I already understood regarding running force film for better quality and speed. Then running pulldown to change from the native 23.97 fps to 29.97 fps. It was the first part that I needed help with. I'm glad I know that there is no reason to run pulldown on "INTERLACED" films. That was what the problem must of been with pulldown. The film was already Interlaced, thus, I already had my source without doing anything else. Thanks for the help.

[SLK001]

Noobee has really done his homework. However, is your source really interlaced? If your source was originally released for a theater, then I would say, "No". However, if the source was a TV release then, "Possibly". Perhaps if you could tell us the name of the source, we could offer some insight.

[DEmberton]

Or if your source is a cap of an NTSC TV broadcast of film sourced material, then what you have is post-pulldown interlaced and you should be able to run an inverse telecine to get it back to 24fps progressive. If this is the case, then converting it back to 24fps and running pulldown.exe on it should give better results than just encoding the 30fps interlaced version.

Dave