Fixing messed up NTSC to PAL conversion to match a real PAL source

[Gwar]

hello,
I have a hard time converting this UK DVD back to a proper PAL. Usually theese Hongkong movies are blend conversions but I have no idea what they did here. Tried the classic srestore, convertfps, change fps to restore the ntsc and then upspeed it to PAL but had no luck whatsoever this runs out of synch constantly. I could care less if I only wanted to do a composite for a few scenes but as I have to audio dub this too this would be overkill.
Maybe somebody of the experts has a clever idea how I can make the UK source match the real PAL source.
https://workupload.com/archive/m9H4DtHN6R
thanks
regards

[davexnet]

Look for a better source, that's horrible. What is this movie?

[Gwar]

I have all sources ever of this Eastern movie and its sadly the only english dubbed source available. The conversion doesn't need to be perfect as there probably is no way to fix this weird blend conversion. It is sourced from the original interlaced UK DVD but it was probably already messed up before they converted it to interlaced 25fps so I couldn't find a fixblend setting which was able to de-blend it back to 23976 and srestore also wasnt able to recognise a special pattern in this. I only want to audio dub the english dvd to the VHS but if it totally drifts apart every few frames its impossible to do that.
The only guy who could know a clever trick to make it match would be

jagabo

, but sadly I already bothered him with so much terrible crap over the years that I probably exceeded his pain threshold

[davexnet]

Is the movie name a secret?
Perhaps you could post a 2nd clip, something better lit with medium speed panning shot

[jagabo]

I don't have a lot of time to play with it today but something like:

Blur(0.0, 0.15)
QTGMC()
SRestore(25)

May work better than the usual QTGMC().SRestore(25). This gets rid of some of the negative ghosting. But it creates some positive ghosting. There may be some way to use the output of both QTGMC() and Blur(0.15).QTGMC() before SRestore() to get the best of both.

[Gwar]

Blur(0.0, 0.15)
QTGMC()
SRestore(25)

thanks jagabo that is quite some impressive deblend attempt. However it still remains that the sources run out of synch quickly and never match although they are supposed to be the same cut. I dont see any additional frames/shots there so it could be just the speed but I'm not shure which weird speed that is supposed to be. Slower than 25 of course but deblending to 23976 or 24 and upspeeding to 25 after that doesnt fix it. No stress from my side I'm not in a hurry with this. thanks a lot for getting into it

Is the movie name a secret?
Perhaps you could post a 2nd clip, something better lit with medium speed panning shot

It's "The Invincible Chinatown Connection" As stated the main problem is that the sources run constantly out of synch although they dont seem to contain extended shots. I have no idea why that is and how to fix it. Usually theese garbage conversions of so many hongkong movies are blended from 25 to 29,97 but in this case they totally messed something up.

here is another sample with less pan shots and you basically have the same scenario: https://workupload.com/archive/ALWxudFgAr

[ProWo]

Use the best video source avaiable and adjust the english audiostream from post #1 to match the videostream.

[davexnet]

I don't understand what you're trying to do. You have the DVD rip (fullscreen, English) and the VHS (widescreen, german)
The two speeds are completely different.
Are you trying to dub the german audio to the DVD video?

[victoriabears]

i sent you a PM

[jagabo]

However it still remains that the sources run out of synch quickly and never match although they are supposed to be the same cut.

I made no attempt to sync with the other video. I was just looking at reducing the blending.

To sync them I downloaded the other video and compared the two: I started by aligning the two videos at the first shot change:

VHS = LWLibavVideoSource("real-PAL-VHS.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2).TFM()
DVD = LWLibavVideoSource("blend-PAL-UKDVD.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2)

# align first shot change
VHS = VHS.Trim(82,0)
DVD = DVD.Trim(84,0)

StackHorizontal(VHS, DVD)

Using that script I determined the last common shot change was at frame 2948 of VHS, frame 3354 of DVD. You can use ChangeFPS() on DVD to make it the same number of frames with:

VHS = LWLibavVideoSource("real-PAL-VHS.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2).TFM()
DVD = LWLibavVideoSource("blend-PAL-UKDVD.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2).TFM()

# align at first shot change
VHS = VHS.Trim(82,0)
DVD = DVD.Trim(84,0)

# last common shot change: VHS at frame 2948, DVD at frame 3354
#	25 * 2948 / 3354 = ~22.649

DVD = DVD.ChangeFPS(22.649)
StackHorizontal(VHS, DVD)

With that you can verify the two videos match (we're not concerned about blended frames here, just where the shot changes occur).

Now lets use the deblending method from earlier to decimate to 22.649 fps to get the right number of frames (preferentially removing blended frames), then then AssumeFPS(25) to get the right frame rate:

LWLibavVideoSource("blend-PAL-UKDVD.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2)

Blur(0.0, 0.15)
QTGMC(preset="fast")
SRestore(frate=22.649)
AssumeFPS(25.00)

Motions looked pretty smooth. I didn't notice any duplicate or missing frames, and saw just a few blended frames. You may have to tune this for the rest of the movie. But now you know how to do it.

[Gwar]

amazing as always,

jagabo

Thanks so much