Excel Saga PAL & NTSC DVDs (telecined, field-blended or interlaced?)

[eddebaby]

Hi,

I've been reading these forums (and doom9) a lot the last few days, so first of all thanks to all for many years of information!

I want to keep digital copies of Excel Saga (an anime) on my HDD for convenience, using the DVDs released by ADV as a source. When I have been doing this sort of thing recently with movies released on PAL DVDs, I have reversed the PAL speed-up on video/audio/sub-picture/chapters (and sometimes taken the audio from sources with the correct speed, where I have them).

However, the PAL DVDs of Excel Saga are not sped-up, they appear to be field-blended (and are certainly the same length as NTSC/24fps versions).

I have one of the discs (so far) as an NTSC copy, and this appears to be mostly 23.976->29.97 telecined (except for the credits, these appear to be 29.97 p or i).

I would like to use this as an opportunity to learn more about telecine, field-blending, interlacing, and how to reverse them (and when it is appropriate to reverse them).

So, my first questions are about identification:

Here are some samples of the video from both the PAL and NTSC DVDs, as well as .d2v files for the entire episodes that the samples are taken from:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oK0ocFiwcrV2hUVvJwZUjR8-viAPgK9w/view?usp=sharing

What method(s) is used for the PAL video?
(It looks to me like it is progressive, where every X frame is field-blended)

What method(s) is used for the NTSC video?
(It looks to me like it is progressive, with 3:2 pulldown, looking at the d2v file suggests to me some soft pulldown, and some long sections of "0s" and "2s" - probably option 1 from here)


Notes from my attempts at identification:

• Using DGPulldown (23.976->23.976) on video from the NTSC DVDs does not produce good results, it makes it look field-blended, and increases the length of the video.
• Using MeGUI to Analyse the video from the NTSC DVDs, gives the following recommendation for the AViSynth script (using TIVTC): tfm(order=1).tdecimate(mode=1) which produces a 24fps video with nice progressive frames, with the same video length (after a quick check).
• Basic attempts to use DGPulldown, TIVTC, AnimeIVTC and yadif on the PAL DVD video have all failed to produce anything noteworthy!

Any help identifying the methods used for these discs would be greatly appreciated And apologies if I have mangled some terminology, hopefully you understand my meaning.

[davexnet]

For the PAL clip you can use something like

qtgmc(preset="medium",tr2=0)
srestore()

Helps with some of the problems, but some blending remains. Wait and see if you get some other repsonses,
a few anime guys in here

[eddebaby]

Thanks davexnet. qtgmc gives similar results to yadif, not bad but still some blending (as you said). I'm still interested in any opinions and ideas on what was done by ADV to produce these PAL discs; but for my own use I am going to try to get all of the NTSC volumes rather than the PAL versions.

Is there a way to "reverse" the sections of 0s and 2s in the NTSC video without re-encoding? i.e in the same way as the soft pulldown sections (patterns of 0, 1, 2, 3) can be "reversed" by DGPulldown. I am assuming that those sections are groups of 5 repeated frames instead of 4 repeated frames, rather than being hard 3:2 pulldown.

[manono]

Is there a way to "reverse" the sections of 0s and 2s in the NTSC video without re-encoding?

You can undo the telecine only if the D2V project file shows your episode to be 100% film. And if you have periods of 0000 and 2222, then it's not 100% film. So, no.

[eddebaby]

You can undo the telecine only if the D2V project file shows your episode to be 100% film. And if you have periods of 0000 and 2222, then it's not 100% film.

I think my wording was not the best, I know how to reverse a soft telecine - I guess I was asking for a "soft" decimate.

And now that I put it like that, I can imagine it is impossible to remove or duplicate frames in a MPEG2 stream (with them being a mix of I and B/P frames).


I'm still after insight in to these discs, my aim is to begin to generalise the methods ADV used to produce their Anime DVDs (and the difference between the NTSC and PAL releases).