Framerate conversion anyone tried these tools or others?

[gll99]

When I had a much slower system, I captured TV shows at lower frame rates so not to tax my cpu and then saved them on cdrw to save hd space for later viewing through my TV-out card. I now have a DVD-642 DVD player which plays mpeg4 avi and would like to convert my avi's so that motion is more fluid.

Many of the programs that change the framerate just duplicate frames and the video motion still looks unnatural when played back.

I have been trying to find some other methods which try to predict what the missing frames should look like and generate new in between frames.
I tried Dynapel's Motionperfect. Unfortunately it's only a 15 second trial demo and the program crashes just when it's about to process the video. Tried it on win98se and winxp pro on 2 computers (P4 XP and older amd233 win98se )with the same results.
I also just tried an Adobe After Effects plugin filter called Retimer (expensive but a trial demo is available). Can't really comment yet because on my P4 it seems to take 3 minutes for each second of video and I'm not too good with Adobe products so maybe I have set something wrong.
Today I just read that Dynapel's Motionperfect technology was also licenced to MGI and that the feature is used in MGI Videowave4 and 5 (now owned by Roxio). Just my luck, I happen to own Videowave 2, 3, 4 and 5 and never noticed mention of this feature (guess I'll have to pull out my books from the storage boxes). I don't know how to prove that the frames are not duplicates but really new in between frames. Does anyone know of an avi frame compare tool? The only test I have is a free Dynapel tool called Videoscope. It showed no duplicate frames in my test videos but what it calls (easy to recover frames?)

Have you tried these or any other tools?

It would also seem to be a valuable method to convert ntsc 23.98 to 29.97 (I know about pulldown but not for avi on a DVP-642).

[BJ_M]

since it is interpolation -- it is not precise and never perfect .. the best tools for this are quite expensive (plug ins for avid , fusion , shake, AE and phoenix tools timemaster are some of them. )

the process is very slow for good results.

I do not like the quality of Dynapel's Motionperfect - but i am: 1. fussy, 2. doing this for cinema/film/HD, 3. price is a lot cheaper ..

[gll99]

Thanks for the comments BJ_M

I already own videowave5 and the output looks pretty good on a couple of small framerate conversion tests of 21fps to 29.97fps. I am not sure if it only duplicated the frames or not. I watched the clips on my dvp-642 hooked to a 32 inch tv and the motion seems smoother but my eyes could be fooling me. I just wondered if there was a way to prove that the newly added frames are not just duplicates. As I said before Videoscope does not identify any duplicate frames just original and quite a few as easily recoverable but this is only in a basic color graph. Do you know of any other tools to identify duplicate frames? Videowave has a section to generate slow motion pics and I am wondering if the frame insertion technology was only implemented there. Too bad Motionperfect won't work for me so I could see for myself. I tried to convert an old black and white 115 min film 23.98 to 29.97 with the Retimer plugin and it showed a timeframe of about 279 hours to convert. I've only done a couple of minutes to test so far but the audio is messed up. Again Videoscope shows no duplicate frames only original and easily recoverable. Why would it not call them all original? What does it mean easily recoverable?
New stuff is always puzzling but I'm too curious to quit now.

[FOO]

You may want to look at Avisynth. It can very easily generate
statistics between frames or subtract every pair of frames and show you
the result.

[BJ_M]

i dont know of any way to examine for duplicate frames other than just looking frame by frame -- i never have that issue ...

i forgot to mention Sony Vegas -- which does a very good job of interpolation when you use it's supersampling feature --

[SaSi]

You may want to try FrameRateConcerterHQ, a nice tool for the tools section. You can find it at:
http://converter.stratopoint.com.

It interpolates missing frames by examining the motion content of adjacent frames. The author perhaps thinks too much about it (hey, it's his baby!) but testing it for the same purpose as you say, converting a 15fps AVI to 25fps, it did a rather good job. And it is not very slow either.

[gll99]

Thanks Sasi

After your note I downloaded the prog. Unfortunately every file I try to load ends up with the message:


I tried xvid,3iv,div3,div52(dx50) multiple files. Same msg

[BJ_M]

i read through the forums for FrameRateConcerterHQ and there is a bit of learning curve going on - on the part of the programmer who wrote it ... though the operation and such to do this in avisynth is flawed also ..

[SaSi]

Thanks Sasi

After your note I downloaded the prog. Unfortunately every file I try to load ends up with the message:


I tried xvid,3iv,div3,div52(dx50) multiple files. Same msg

Yes, I have the same message in some files. However, it appears that processing them through VirtualdUB (in direct stream mode), fixed the problem. ( ).

[gll99]

SaSi
I know vdub directstream is very fast but I hate going through hoops for a time limited or marked output shareware. While I applaud the efforts of the author, if it was freeware or if I was given a free copy for beta testing then I might be more inclined to run tests and provide feedback. I expect commercial software (even trials) except maybe beta versions to at least work with most files right out of the box.

FOO and BJ_M
My knowledge of avisynth is limited to a few basic adjustments made to some files during frameserving operations. Even then I copied them from others and tailored them to my needs. I've always intended to give it more serious consideration but you know how things get in the way.

8) Now if someone was to drop some scripts here to do the work for me that's alltogether another matter.