Strange telecine pattern [p,tb,tb,bb,bb,p]

[jmac698]

This is a (probably, as BBC) pal-land source on ntsc. Possibly film -> pal -> ntsc.
Anyhow, it goes like this:
progressive, progressive, top field blending with previous field, top field blended with previous field, bottom field blended with previous field, bottom field blended with previous field, and repeat.
Just to be clear, when the top field is blended, the bottom field is fine. I think it comes out top field first so by previous field I mean, when the top field is blended then it must be blended with the previous frames' bottom field. And when the bottom field is blended, the top field is fine. I could live with just interpolating the non-blended fields.
Smartdeint works great - for four frames. Then there's two frames of blending. At full speed, you don't notice the blending so much but what bugs me is the judder (?) on pans. Movements are very jerky.
My ultimate goal is to restore this to 24fps with ntsc pulldown flags.
Even if I could manually specify the pattern of bad frames I could fix it by hand. I think some of the advanced processing options will change the phase of the smartdeint - in other words maybe the two bad frames are in another spot, so if I could somehow alternate the settings every 6 frames?
I've read about restore24() (which I've been unable to download anywhere), but it's meant for pal->ntsc and might not work for me. I'm pretty sure I could recover the blending with simple arithmetic (with some little amount of ghosting). Any ideas?

[laserfan]

This wouldn't by chance be "Masterpiece Theatre - Bleak House" would it?

I don't how you ID the pattern as you have jmac (you're smarter than I am), but can confirm that no EASY method (apparently) exists to convert it. I have tried converting my Transport Stream recordings to XviD using AGK and it won't make a smooth conversion, despite trying several "hidden options" ie. neither IVTC nor DeInt seem to work.

[jmac698]

laserfan,
turns out this is a common problem in pal->ntsc conversion, some fields are blended.
I figured it out by stepping through the source in virtualdub. With a moving object you can clearly see, by pressing the left/right arrow keys, that part of the previous field is blended 50%.
The solution is incredibly simple. tdeint(mode=1) repal().
That works great for me. There are two approaches to the problem, one is to subtract fields to get back the originals, which works in theory, but in reality the mpeg encoding ruins the clean relationship and you get ugly colored pixels.
The other approach, above, just throws away the bad bits and interpolates the missing info with a *very* good deinterlacer.
And no, it wasn't Bleakhouse :) But this probably applies to anything like Dr. Who, etc.

[laserfan]

I managed to miss your post and spent hours & hours trying different Xvid settings, then IVTC methods, and finally got the following to work:

Telecide(guide=1).Decimate(cycle=6,mode=1)

It had looked pretty good w/default cycle=5, the cycle=6 made the body of the program perfect, but the credit sequence was stutter-y. Then I added the mode=1 and everything looks good.

I don't know why this works, but I'm happy with the result.

I will try your suggestion before I throw the originals away!