IVTC of 'Castle' episode leaving blended frames (ghosting?)

[txporter]

I have some 1080i captures of the TV show 'Castle'. I am trying to process them through IVTC and re-encode with x264. The resultant video seems to have some blended frames. I am not certain that these are truly blends though, or maybe it is better called ghosting?, or if I just need to process them differently through TFM.Tdecimate.

At any rate, I am stepping through them with a simple MPEG2Source("d2v").TFM().Tdecimate() avs script in vdub. At 23.976fps, I noticed blending on frames 980, 1060, 1101, 1107, 1276, 1281, 1322, 1341. I stopped looking after that.

Here is an example of what I am seeing (frame 979 is good, 980 is blended [look at Castle's head]):


Can I do anything to fix this? Sample clip can be found here.

I have tinkered with the different settings in TFM (order, mode, pp) and Tdecimate (mode, hybrid) but didn't see a noticeable change.

[poisondeathray]

I haven't looked at the clip, but could this be partly due to ABC's time shifting policy? Apparently they drop frames or do some weird stuff to enable more advertisement time

[txporter]

Possibly. I haven't heard of that, but could be. Is this something that Srestore along with TFM.Tdecimate might be able to improve? It seems that Srestore is mainly geared toward re-constructing NTSC to PAL conversions (or maybe the other way around), but I thought I saw some threads where it was used with 29.97 --> 23.976 conversions as well.

[edDV]

ABC has been known to play with frame repeat sequence. ABC broadcasts 1280x720p. How did you upscale to 1920x1080?

[txporter]

ABC has been known to play with frame repeat sequence. ABC broadcasts 1280x720p. How did you upscale to 1920x1080?

I am only capturing. No conversion yet. Perhaps Time Warner is upscaling to 1080i or something like that? I am in Austin, TX.

[txporter]

I did a little bit of googling and found a thread here about converted Charlie Brown special from ABC HD where manono suggested using Cdeblend(). I tried adding that between TFM() and Tdecimate() and it does get rid of that blended frame, but I have dup frames now.

[poisondeathray]

When you examine the fields:

assumetff()
separatefields()

And step through it, the blends are in the source. So either ABC is broadcasting it that way from whatever funky things they are doing, or the method in which you captured it caused the blends

You could use a bobber, then srestore, and it does seeem to get rid of some of the bad blends eg.

MPEG2Source()
Yadif(mode=1,order=1)
Srestore(frate=23.976)

There are other PP modes for srestore, and it's not a filter I use alot, so I would wait for manono (try PMing him) or some others who use it more to suggest better modes. You can replace yadif with any bobber BTW.

[txporter]

When you examine the fields:

assumetff()
separatefields()

And step through it, the blends are in the source. So either ABC is broadcasting it that way from whatever funky things they are doing, or the method in which you captured it caused the blends

You could use a bobber, then srestore, and it does seeem to get rid of some of the bad blends eg.

MPEG2Source()
Yadif(mode=1,order=1)
Srestore(frate=23.976)

There are other PP modes for srestore, and it's not a filter I use alot, so I would wait for manono (try PMing him) or some others who use it more to suggest better modes. You can replace yadif with any bobber BTW.

Thanks, pdr. I capture these shows on my TivoHD. It is just a straight capture of the digital signal. I had also noticed that the blends already exist in the source as well. I will take a look at what you suggested with yadif and srestore.

[edDV]

When you examine the fields:

assumetff()
separatefields()

And step through it, the blends are in the source. So either ABC is broadcasting it that way from whatever funky things they are doing, or the method in which you captured it caused the blends

You could use a bobber, then srestore, and it does seeem to get rid of some of the bad blends eg.

MPEG2Source()
Yadif(mode=1,order=1)
Srestore(frate=23.976)

There are other PP modes for srestore, and it's not a filter I use alot, so I would wait for manono (try PMing him) or some others who use it more to suggest better modes. You can replace yadif with any bobber BTW.

Thanks, pdr. I capture these shows on my TivoHD. It is just a straight capture of the digital signal. I had also noticed that the blends already exist in the source as well. I will take a look at what you suggested with yadif and srestore.

ABC transmits 1280x720p at 59.94*. Your cable system sends 720p/59.94 to your cable box (in most cases). If you set your box (Tivo) to 1080i/29.97 out, the conversion is done in your local box.

How are you capturing from the Tivo?


*with a nominal 3:2:3:2 frame repeat. But ABC plays with the frame repeat sequence maybe to increase quality during action scenes, maybe for time shift but more likely to screw with capture software**.

** This would also provide a signature or watermark for when and how this was captured. Maybe I should patent this idea. OK let's say "patent pending" 1:46pm PDT 4/1/2010 witnessed by VideoHelp.

[txporter]

ABC transmits 1280x720p at 59.94. Your cable system sends 720p/59.94 to your cable box (in most cases). If you set your box (Tivo) to 1080i/29.97 out, the conversion is done in your local box.

How are you capturing from the Tivo?

Tivos do not do any conversion of the digital signal. It just captures it. It doesn't have the horsepower to do on the fly conversion.

[txporter]

Ok, tried an encode with TFM().Tdecimate() and another with Yadif(mode=1,order=1).Srestore(frate=23.976). Processing with TIVTC provides smoother playback while Yadif.Srestore seems to get rid of the blends but sometimes has dup frames which make playback a little jerky at times. If I have to chose between those two methods, I will probably just stick with TIVTC since the blends really aren't too noticeable at full speed.

[poisondeathray]

I didn't see any dupes , but I have to admit I just looked quickly

Anyways, I would wait for manono or jagabo (or some others) to have a look at it and give better suggestions

[txporter]

ABC transmits 1280x720p at 59.94*. Your cable system sends 720p/59.94 to your cable box (in most cases). If you set your box (Tivo) to 1080i/29.97 out, the conversion is done in your local box.

How are you capturing from the Tivo?


*with a nominal 3:2:3:2 frame repeat. But ABC plays with the frame repeat sequence maybe to increase quality during action scenes, maybe for time shift but more likely to screw with capture software**.

** This would also provide a signature or watermark for when and how this was captured. Maybe I should patent this idea. OK let's say "patent pending" 1:46pm PDT 4/1/2010 witnessed by VideoHelp.

Here is what I could find about the ABC broadcast here in Texas. According to some other folks (fairly old posts, must still be doing the same thing), the local affiliates are upscaling the 720p signal to 1080i. Link1 Link2 (and post 5)

@poisondeathray- Yeah, I am not giving up yet. Will wait to see if manono/jagabo has a comment on it.

[edDV]

ABC transmits 1280x720p at 59.94. Your cable system sends 720p/59.94 to your cable box (in most cases). If you set your box (Tivo) to 1080i/29.97 out, the conversion is done in your local box.

How are you capturing from the Tivo?

Tivos do not do any conversion of the digital signal. It just captures it. It doesn't have the horsepower to do on the fly conversion.

Every HD cable box (e.g. Motorola or SciAtl) does inbox 1920x1080i to 720p or 1280x720p to 1080i conversion. I didn't say they do this well.

If you have an IEEE-1394 port, you get the native stream without conversion.

Still you haven't said how you captured? This would narrow the issues.

[txporter]

ABC transmits 1280x720p at 59.94. Your cable system sends 720p/59.94 to your cable box (in most cases). If you set your box (Tivo) to 1080i/29.97 out, the conversion is done in your local box.

How are you capturing from the Tivo?

Tivos do not do any conversion of the digital signal. It just captures it. It doesn't have the horsepower to do on the fly conversion.

Every HD cable box (e.g. Motorola or SciAtl) does inbox 1920x1080i to 720p or 1280x720p to 1080i conversion. I didn't say they do this well.

If you have an IEEE-1394 port, you get the native stream without conversion.

Still you haven't said how you captured? This would narrow the issues.

Sorry, I have been trying to explain the capture. My TivoHD does the capture. It simply records the incoming digital stream. It uses a cable card to decode the signal.

[edDV]

ABC transmits 1280x720p at 59.94*. Your cable system sends 720p/59.94 to your cable box (in most cases). If you set your box (Tivo) to 1080i/29.97 out, the conversion is done in your local box.

How are you capturing from the Tivo?


*with a nominal 3:2:3:2 frame repeat. But ABC plays with the frame repeat sequence maybe to increase quality during action scenes, maybe for time shift but more likely to screw with capture software**.

** This would also provide a signature or watermark for when and how this was captured. Maybe I should patent this idea. OK let's say "patent pending" 1:46pm PDT 4/1/2010 witnessed by VideoHelp.

Here is what I could find about the ABC broadcast here in Texas. According to some other folks (fairly old posts, must still be doing the same thing), the local affiliates are upscaling the 720p signal to 1080i. Link1 Link2 (and post 5)

@poisondeathray- Yeah, I am not giving up yet. Will wait to see if manono/jagabo has a comment on it.

Don't give up. Let's figure this out. Why are you getting blend fields?

I'll look more closely at those links tonight but I'm very familiar with ABC in TX (mostly Belo*). Those are my drinking and BBQ buddies.


* WFAA-8 (ABC Dallas), KVUE (ABC Austin), KHOU-11 (CBS Houston), KENS-5 (CBS San Antonio), ... also WWL (CBS New Orleans)

[poisondeathray]

If there is something wrong with your capture process, and you can get a source without blends, that would be ideal

In one of those threads you linked, they mention jerky playback during ABC's "Lost" the TV show - that's the time shifting / frame dropping that I was referring to earlier. But that's not in this source that you uploaded - you have a difference scenario with blended fields

But regarding srestore() : some people have issues with it because apparently there are some conflicts in the some of the prerequisite filters, or using an older srestore.avs script. Also non-linear accesses can cause issues with srestore (you have to encode straight, no scrubbing back & forth)

For example, here is the 1st 1000 frames using srestore() and resized , encoded to divx, and the blend around 980 is gone, and I couldn't detect any dupes. There is a slight jump around 750, but I thnk that's because the original had a 2 blends between 745-750.

[txporter]

From everything that I have read and know about how the TivoHD captures video, there is no encoding/conversion done to digital sources. Analog signals, yes, but digital is captured as-is. The blends must be part of the broadcast.

Perhaps it isn't dupes, but when I was watching the end of the clip where Castle is sitting on a stool talking to his mother, it seems to skip forward and back a frame giving it a jerky feel. I think that was around 1:40. I will keep at it though. The blends were definitely gone from what I could see with Srestore.

[edDV]

From everything that I have read and know about how the TivoHD captures video, there is no encoding/conversion done to digital sources. Analog signals, yes, but digital is captured as-is. The blends must be part of the broadcast.

If this was true, you would be capturing 1280x720p/59.94.

It would help if you identified your TV station. Most don't alter resolution or frame rate from the network feed but they can alter bit rate (i.e. transcode).

[poisondeathray]

Perhaps it isn't dupes, but when I was watching the end of the clip where Castle is sitting on a stool talking to his mother, it seems to skip forward and back a frame giving it a jerky feel. I think that was around 1:40. I will keep at it though. The blends were definitely gone from what I could see with Srestore.

I can't reproduce what you're seeing

Maybe we're getting different results from different plugins? ... What I mentioned earlier. IIRC, Jagabo seemed to have difficulty with srestore because of different .dll versions

What are you encoding to? How are you playing it back? Can you upload that section you encoded that has jerkyness?

[txporter]

From everything that I have read and know about how the TivoHD captures video, there is no encoding/conversion done to digital sources. Analog signals, yes, but digital is captured as-is. The blends must be part of the broadcast.

If this was true, you would be capturing 1280x720p/59.94.

It would help if you identified your TV station. Most don't alter resolution or frame rate from the network feed but they can alter bit rate (i.e. transcode).

It is KVUE. Both the OTA and Time Warner cable feed are being identified as 1080i by the Tivo. I can set the output to Native, 1080i fixed or 720p fixed. In all case, it is identified as a 1080i stream. I am downloading a clip that I just recorded on the OTA signal to my computer to verify that it is indeed 1080i as well.

update: OTA clip is also 1080i. Not everything that I record on my Tivo is 1080i. Fox is all 720p. NBC, ABC, CBS are all 1080i. SD channels are still SD. I have my output set to 720p fixed all of the time.

Perhaps it isn't dupes, but when I was watching the end of the clip where Castle is sitting on a stool talking to his mother, it seems to skip forward and back a frame giving it a jerky feel. I think that was around 1:40. I will keep at it though. The blends were definitely gone from what I could see with Srestore.

I can't reproduce what you're seeing

Maybe we're getting different results from different plugins? ... What I mentioned earlier. IIRC, Jagabo seemed to have difficulty with srestore because of different .dll versions

What are you encoding to? How are you playing it back? Can you upload that section you encoded that has jerkyness?

I can upload the part that I converted when I get back to my work computer tomorrow. I was encoding with x264 (resizing to 848x480) and playing back on MPC-HC. Perhaps my laptop was having trouble with h.264. I can try re-encoding with HCenc tomorrow and see if that was it.

[lordsmurf]

Some video is edited post-film, so you can't cleanly IVTC it.

[Soopafresh]

That's KVUE + Belo for you.

I wish I knew who to contact at Belo to find out a rationalization for the conversion.

I also wonder if there's how a hardware issue with KVUE where they're stuck with 1080i forever.

Does anyone watching KVUE on a 1080i screen have the same issues as those of us watching on 720p? (Motion blur, blockiness, etc...)

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=4926663#post4926663

[edDV]

It seems all of Belo's ABC stations convert the 720p/59.94 network feed to 1080i for broadcast. I haven't been able to find out why but it seems odd to me. So that explains your cadence problem. ABC fiddles with the frame repeats and that could show as split fields or field blends after deinterlace in a 1080i conversion. It could also be happening in your TIVO box. Check out other stations especially FOX, National Geographic, ESPN or Disney which are also native 720p.

One option is to put up an antenna and go for KSAT-TV 12 ABC in San Antonio which broadcasts 720p.

[manono]

I have some 1080i captures of the TV show 'Castle'. I am trying to process them through IVTC and re-encode with x264. The resultant video seems to have some blended frames. I am not certain that these are truly blends though, or maybe it is better called ghosting?, or if I just need to process them differently through TFM.Tdecimate.

ABC used to drop fields (or frames, at 59.94fps). Now, they're blending fields together (or frames, for the progressive 59.94fps broadcasts). This makes the effective framerate higher and the show shorter. If I were you, I wouldn't worry about it because trying to fix it may be more trouble than it's worth and may not be entirely possible anyway. As long as you can get it to play smoothly with a standard IVTC, that's good enough, I think.

What's the final output going to be, DVD perhaps, or are you going for a 1080p MKV or something like that? Anyway, if you have all the time in the world, something like this seems to work OK:

Yadif(Order=1,Mode=1)#or your favorite bobber
SRestore(Frate=29.97)
TDecimate(Mode=2,Rate=24.2,MaxNDL=4,M2PA=True)

But because of the M2PA=True, opening it is very slow, as is seeking.

[txporter]

I have some 1080i captures of the TV show 'Castle'. I am trying to process them through IVTC and re-encode with x264. The resultant video seems to have some blended frames. I am not certain that these are truly blends though, or maybe it is better called ghosting?, or if I just need to process them differently through TFM.Tdecimate.

ABC used to drop fields (or frames, at 59.94fps). Now, they're blending fields together (or frames, for the progressive 59.94fps broadcasts). This makes the effective framerate higher and the show shorter. If I were you, I wouldn't worry about it because trying to fix it may be more trouble than it's worth and may not be entirely possible anyway. As long as you can get it to play smoothly with a standard IVTC, that's good enough, I think.

What's the final output going to be, DVD perhaps, or are you going for a 1080p MKV or something like that? Anyway, if you have all the time in the world, something like this seems to work OK:

Yadif(Order=1,Mode=1)#or your favorite bobber
SRestore(Frate=29.97)
TDecimate(Mode=2,Rate=24.2,MaxNDL=4,M2PA=True)

But because of the M2PA=True, opening it is very slow, as is seeking.

Thanks for all your thoughts, everyone.

My final output is really back onto my Tivo to watch the show. I download a batch of them to my PC. Strip the commercials with VideoRedo and then either bring them back or encode them to x264 to save space and then push them back up. The TivoHD can play back h.264, vc-1 and mpeg2 files.

How did you come up with 24.2 for the framerate? Is that just setting it to something larger than 23.976fps? The maxNDL parameters says that the max non-duplicate length is 4. I am having trouble understanding that. Doesn't that mean that it will be AT LEAST standard 3:2 pulldown decimation? So the rate would at most reach 23.976fps (or go below it, I guess), right?

@poisondeathray- As for the jerkiness that I was seeing. I have uploaded an encoded version (HCenc) called xxx-hc.mpg. If you look from frames 29-37, you can see duplicate frames there. The other dup that I referred to earlier was at 2579-2580.

Is ABC the only one doing these odd things to their video? I don't think I have noticed it with CBS or FOX or NBC material.

[txporter]

Ok, tried manono's script. My, it IS slow. HCenc complains about the framerate, so I can't use that. It does encode fine with x264, but I need to stretch the audio since it goes out of sync. It is still showing some duplicate frames at the beginning when the camera pans up the parking meter (first 60 or so frames). The blend is gone around frame 980 (now around 990). The jerkiness I noted around 2580 is still there (now around 2600).

What am I supposed to notice with manono's script vs pdr's initial suggestion (meaning what is fixed/better)? In playback, they seem basically the same except the audio goes out of sync since I didn't stretch it. I am probably going to just try to decide between a standard TFM.Tdecimate, Yadif.Srestore(23.976) and just leaving it as-is to avoid the whole mess.

Thanks for all the help on this. I love learning more about video editing from you folk.

[poisondeathray]

I think there might be differences between our plugins or encoding causing different results; we're getting different results. e.g. if you looked at the 0-1000 frame AVI I uploaded, the frame repeats from 29-37 aren't there in that version

I'll encode the whole clip and see if that makes a difference

ABC is the only one that I've heard of that does the time shifting or frame dropping, and they started doing it quite awhile back. I haven't heard of the blending until manono talked about it above.

[txporter]

I think there might be differences between our plugins or encoding causing different results; we're getting different results. e.g. if you looked at the 0-1000 frame AVI I uploaded, the frame repeats from 29-37 aren't there in that version

I'll encode the whole clip and see if that makes a difference

ABC is the only one that I've heard of that does the time shifting or frame dropping, and they started doing it quite awhile back. I haven't heard of the blending until manono talked about it above.

I am using avisynth 2.5.8MT (set). Perhaps it is my RemoveGrain.dll. I saw manono mentioned it in another thread. Hmm, still shows same thing with the frame repeats during parking metric pan. Guess that isn't it.

[txporter]

Ok, tried using DGindex/dgdecode 1.5.8 rather than 1.5.6 that I was using. Same result.

Here are the plugin modified dates:
dgdecode.dll - 3/6/10
average.dll - 12/16/07
mt_masktools-25.dll - 4/19/08
(Masktools.dll is also in avisynth plugin directory - 8/7/06) - could this be it?
removegrain.dll - 8/1/05 (also tried with 10/24/07)
srestore.avsi - 10/6/08
yadif.dll - 10/8/09
TIVTC.dll - 1/17/08
vsfilter.dll - 8/20/06