720p HDTV Broadcast to 480p DVD-R/RW?

[MarkGrigsby]

I had forgotten "The Inside" was a Fox show. Unlike ABC, Fox has never announced any plans for 720p series production. This show is either upconverted 480i or converted 1080i 30.

Not sure I understand this - are you saying that Fox's main dramas (e.g. 24. O.C., Prison Break etc) are not produced in 720p24?

[Robert Simandl]

They're 720p, 24fps. And they simply repeat frames to boost the frame rate to the 720p standard of 59.94fps.

[stshipley]

Robert,

I've been trying to execute your strategy using TMPGEnc.

Regardlesss of how I set the manual inverse telecine, using your strategy of the frame immediately after the interlaced b frame, the result file looks like what happens if I go from 60p -> 24p without doing anything intelligent. The result I'm talking about is the 5-6 seconds of smooth pretty playback followed by 1 second of extreme jitter. I thought the manual inverse telecine should have takn care of this! I even stepped through some sections of the frames to make sure that each frame was unique, and not a duplicate, but there are some.

I'm using a 2 minute sample from a HD recording I made of "Lost."

Any advice?

-STS

[edDV]

Robert,

I've been trying to execute your strategy using TMPGEnc.

Regardlesss of how I set the manual inverse telecine, using your strategy of the frame immediately after the interlaced b frame, the result file looks like what happens if I go from 60p -> 24p without doing anything intelligent. The result I'm talking about is the 5-6 seconds of smooth pretty playback followed by 1 second of extreme jitter. I thought the manual inverse telecine should have takn care of this! I even stepped through some sections of the frames to make sure that each frame was unique, and not a duplicate, but there are some.

I'm using a 2 minute sample from a HD recording I made of "Lost."

Any advice?

-STS

Observation:

Lost is 720p59.94 from our ABC local station. It can get there in one of two ways, maybe more:

-Derived from 1080p24 "Digital Cinema" transfer. In this case it would be downscaled to 1280x720p24 and frames would be repeated in a 3:2 frame sequence to create 720p59.94.

-Transferred to 1080i29.97 (telecined 2:3 from 24FPS) and converted to 720i29.97 for HDTV+ 480i29.97 for SDTV. The 720i29.97 would then be "line doubled" for 720p59.94 as broadcast.

Also, since we started this thread last summer, I now notice that FOX is doing all (or most) of their HD programming in 720p59.94 the same as ABC and ESPN HD.

[stshipley]

Robert,

It's the first way. I have clearly observed the aabbbccddd pattern in the frames. When I use TMPGEnc, I can witness this, and for the most part (I can't scan 50000 frames by hand), your method marks the right frames to keep.

But then the encoded file looks like I described . . . 6-8 seconds of good looking video followed byt one second or so of the really serious staggering jitter.

I don't understand why . . . like I said above, your method chooses the frames to keep flawlessly!

By the way, thank you for responding so quickly!

-STS

[Robert Simandl]

stshipley,

I'd like to say you're welcome but it was edDV that responded so fast...

Sorry to say I won't be much help with LOST. I've not been able to get past the EDITING stage on *any* ABC show at all.

I don't know whether it's the network or just the local affiliate (probably the affiliate since I haven't seen anyone else here complain), but when I try to edit an ABC HD show with either VideoRedo or Womble, the result jitters and is waaaaaaaaay out of sync. In fact, VideoRedo goes so far as to show error messages about having to delete thousands of frames to maintain sync (but the edited file is way out of sync anyway).

Note that I haven't even TRIED to do any converting yet. This is during an attempted editing of commercials without any reencoding.

stshipley, was that two minute LOST segment a raw two minute recording you had done (started recording then stopped recording two mintes later), or had you recorded the whole episode and edited a two minute segment out of it?

[stshipley]

I have a Mac and a PC. I have an EyeTv 500 for the Mac, which is a native ATSC recorder for the MAc. It nicely saves the prgrams as MPEG files, rather than transport streams or any of that, so I was able to save a few steps on your chart. It also allows for nice clean edits of your programs. That is how I was able to extract a 2 minute samle to work on. There is nothing on the Mac that doesn't cost $1000 that will even do a simple Inverse Telecine let alone go from 60p to 24p. But Google led me to this thread, it made sense, and I'm trying out TMPGEnc . . . with no luck. But it HAS to be possible . . . I've seen the downloadable versions on the Internet too.

Using only the Mac, I can go from 60p to 30p, but the frames go abcdd. That's no good, so I figure I have to cut all the way down to 24p. So far TMPGEnc isn't doing any better than basic Quicktime.

I should also mention that I'm not trying to make a DVD. I'm leaving the 720p the same size. I just want to whack the unecessary frames and go from 60fps to 24fps.

Thanks again for your help,

-STS

[junkmalle]

Using only the Mac, I can go from 60p to 30p, but the frames go abcdd. That's no good, so I figure I have to cut all the way down to 24p. So far TMPGEnc isn't doing any better than basic Quicktime.

Try VirtualDubMPEG2. Go to Video -> Frame Rate. In the "Fame Rate Conversion" box select "Convert to FPS" and set the frame rate to 23.976. That should work for progressive 59.94 to 23.976 progressive.

You can also use AVISynth's SelectEvery() command like this:

SelectEvery(5, 0, 3)

which means out of every 5 frames output frames 0 and 3 (out of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4). Or:

SelectEvery(5, 0, 2)

Which outputs frames 0 and 2 instead. One of those should work.

[stshipley]

Junkmalle,

Being a AVIsynth newbie, is it possible to use the select(5, 0, 3) to output MPEG2?

Can you whip up a short avs script for me that does that?

Thanks,

-STS

[junkmalle]

I'm not such a wiz with AVISynth either. But something like this should work:

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\MPEGDecoder.dll")
MPEGSource("filename.mpg")
SelectEvery(5, 0, 3)

AVISynth doesn't output MPEG but you can open that script with whatever MPEG encoder you usually use.

Note you'll need the MPEGDecoder.dll for opening MPEG files. I don't remember where I got it but it shouldn't be too hard to find. And you'll have to change "filename.mpg" to the path\name of your source MPEG file.