MPEG-1 Flicker

[midimidi]

Haven't seen a whole lot posted about this. We are currently making a special Video on CD, where the video is nothing more than an MPEG-1, and the player is based on FlashAnts FM Projector, using an embedded version of Windows Media Player 6.4. I should note that this final delivery is fairly set-in-stone, and its a LONG story that I don't want to get into. To make things simple, we MUSt end up with an MPEG-1, that is generally being played through Windows Media 6.4 (or any unknown version of quicktime, when played on a Mac).

The problem we are currently having is that the MPEG-1's playback has a subtle flicker, that is pronounced during certain scenes, but not so much during others. If needed, I can try to upload a small clip.

Here is the process currently in place:
The original source material is typically beta. The original video is edited on an aging Avid system on a Mac. An quicktime mov (uncompressed? - not sure) is exported from the Avid, and then imported into Premiere Pro 1.5 (Canopus-based hardware/codec), where further edits are made.

The final Premiere edit is then sent through a de-interlace filter, and encoded using MainConcept's MPEG-1 settings. We use MainConcept mostly because its quality really looks nice, but also because it allows us to change very specific settings for MPEG-1 video, particularly resolution (which has to be lowered) and bitrate. We generally bump up the bitrate a bit from the standard VideoCD settings, since the videos are fairly short and can easily fit on a CD.

Any thoughts? Are there any "flicker-removal" plugins or tools out there?

[harley2ride]

I seem to remember that when de-interlacing, you can do it odd or even. Using the wrong one could be causing the flicker.

[merkin]

Not sure if you fixed this midimidi, but I've been having exactly the same problem and managed to pretty much sort it. It's not to do with interlacing, it seems to be directly connected to the MainConcept "Quality" setting when encoding mpeg1. It ranges from 1 - 5, at 5 (default) you get the bad flickering but at 1 it's completely gone. Of course, you lose quality (although not much in fairness) the lower the setting, but I found that at about 2 - 2.5 the flickering is still not noticeable and the video looks fine quality wise. Give it a go