VFR Encoding mixed video/film TV shows from DVD - Worth it?

[Killer3737]

I have a handful of DVDs of old British TV shows that I want to encode. It was common practice in the 70s, 80s and 90s for TV shows (particularly BBC) to shoot the studio footage on video tape whilst any scenes shot on location/outdoors were done on 16mm film because lugging huge TV video cameras around wasn't usually practical.

Encoding these as VFR felt like the right thing to do as best practice, QTGMC on the video portions whilst leaving the film alone and feeding in a timecodes.txt file. I know how to do that, but it's more work and a bit of a faff. The other option of course is to just duplicate the progressive film frames and have the output file be a simple CFR 50fps.

My question is then, is it worth it? Do the benefits outweight the extra work needed, working out all the change points, creating the TC file etc? I found a few old threads from 2016 and earlier with many suggesting not to bother with VFR, but is that still the case? How do modern HDTVs and things like Plex handle it? Are they just going to duplicate the film frames anyway on playback?

[Swedaniel]

If you are new to it and find things complicated, an program or tv to then do an playback stunt on your videos would be an huge set back! I think once you get into things reaching an more "professional" knowledge and skill base on how to fix such videos you might feel it is much easier to get the jobs done and not feel it is an setback! Then i think it will be worth it somehow and somewhere!

Since most people are liars in forums and chat it sound like to me it is worth bothering about VFR!

[hello_hello]

For NTSC DVDs I'd use VFR because there's tools such a TIVTC to automate it, and the alternative would be to convert 30fps to 24fps (or the other way around) which is usually done by dropping/adding frames using frame blending. The main downside though is TIVTC only de-interlaces the video sections to 30fps.

For PAL DVDs it's probably easier to duplicate the frames in the film sections, as if you're using a 50Hz display, at 25fps the frames in the film sections would just display for two refreshes anyway.

At 24 fps on a 60Hz display, 12 frames display for 2 refreshes and 12 display for 3, so they'd display in a 2-3-2-3 pattern. At 25fps it's not as even as 15 of the 25 frames would have to display for 2 refreshes and 10 display for 3, so the pattern would be something like 2-2-3-2-3.
At 50fps, I assume 40 frames display for 1 refresh and 10 display for 2, but as every second frame is a repeat I think the pattern works out much the same as it would for 25fps.