Best way to handle DVDs that are mostly progressive.

[ndjamena]

Buffy for one, it was originally recorded on 23.976fps film then converted to NTSC using pull-down and the special effects were added afterwards as interlaced, but on the PAL releases it looks like they went back to the original film for the most part and then used speed-up on it. However, the scenes that had special effects applied look like they've been converted to PAL ST:TNG style by blending every 5th and 6th field from the original NTSC source. I've encoded up to season 4 at this point by running it through QTGMC then using SRestore to return it to 25fps. I've just started ripping StarGate SG1 and can see that it seems to have been converted in exactly the same way, however the quality is much poorer and I'm worried about running that through QTGMC and warping the crappy picture even further, before I get that far I figured I should check if there's an actual better way of handling these kinds of TV Shows.

[Brad]

By the '90s the standard high-grade Snell & Wilcox conversion equipment performed an operation termed Digital Electronic Film Transfer that took an NTSC master, reversed pulldown, and deinterlaced + field-blended portions that were originally fully 29.97i.

All else being equal, you're best off seeking out the NTSC DVDs and working from those. Otherwise you're just asking for added headaches.

I've only directly compared a couple shows, but the PAL releases actually had lowered effective vertical resolution because of the stretching.

[ndjamena]

Grrrr, I'd noticed there were a few interlaced frames in SG1 at the scene-cuts but didn't have a clue why they were there until I woke up this morning and realised it was probably an IVTC artefact. You pretty much just confirmed the worst. I'm hoping it's a different story with Buffy, since I'm sure the NTSC masters of season 4 should be 4:3 whereas the PAL version is 16:9, plus the first episode has quite a lot of interlacing simply because a lot of scenes are one field off (unless they IVTC'd then edited for some reason). SG1 really does look like crap compared to Buffy, plus Buffy exists in an HD format.

Anyway, from the lack of processing input, I'm assuming QTGMC + srestore really is the best option for this kind of work. Thanks for the info!

[ndjamena]

SetMemoryMax(1024)

Shift=3

S1 = MPEG2SOURCE("Video 1.d2v", CPU = 4)
S2 = MergeChroma(ConvertToY8(S1).Crop(Shift, 0, 0, 0).AddBorders(0,0,Shift,0).ConvertToYV12(), S1)

Q0 = QTGMC(S2, Preset="Placebo",TR0=1,TR1=1,TR2=0)
Q1 = Q0.SelectEven()
Q2 = Q0.SelectOdd()

Interleave(TFM(S2, field=1, slow=2, clip2=Q1, cthresh=6, chroma=true, MI=40, PP=7, hint=false), TFM(S2, field=0, slow=2, clip2=Q2, cthresh=6, chroma=true, MI=40, PP=7, hint=false))

This is the "Step 1" script I'm currently using for Beast Wars (PAL Madman Australia). It works much faster than a simple QTGMC and hopefully keeps SOME extra detail. For some reason I'm proud of it although I don't know if it actually does anything useful...