Solid line, blurry line, solid line, blurry line etc etc. Help!

[ShinSan]

I have a problem with a few .avi captures (cartoon-based) I've been doing recently. What happens is that the videos would have solid lines, and then the next frame the line would be blurry, and then another frame the line is solid again.

Basically like this (N = notblurry, B = blurry):

NNBNBBBNNBBNBB

which is way distracting when watching the video. I have tried all sorts of filters, but Temporal Smoother is the only one I've found that can compensate for it, and while it works for the background, the foreground objects suffer as y'all would expect it to.

For now I posted a clip on rapidshare:

http://rapidshare.de/files/28578521/wavylines.avi.html

Here, it's the lines on the filing cabinet looking like they are wiggling like crazy.

Can anyone recommend a good filter?

[Trixter]

How are you capturing this video? I see some fields blended before resize, and some not blended before resize. In fact, why are you resizing to 512x384? Just leave it at 720x???. In any case, the goofy resizing and blending/not blending is the cause of your problem.

[kakomu]

The squiggly lines are from telecine lines, I'm sure.

If this is from NTSC VHS tape, I would assume it's due to your capturing the video at 24 fps. You'll probably want to capture at the full 29.97 fps and then use a deinterlacing filter to either IVTC the video to 23.976 fps or blend the fields. Tom's Motion Compensation also works rather well.

[ShinSan]

Capped at 640x480 huffyuv. 29.976, ran telecide and decimate. Yep, it's NTSC VHS, and a really old one at that, really bad conditions (old tape, recorded at LP, never expected to try to digitally capture it in the future).

Nope, it has the same thing lines at 640 res. The resizing isn't what made that. Also, I have another tape that gave me the same problem.

I'll try making a cap at 720 using both DScaler and virtualdub.

At least trying to make this clip look good will make me better at avisynth.

Usually I have it set to 640x480 for those times I need to use XVid to capture TV with (of course old VHS tapes are capped using huffy).

[ShinSan]

Okay, here's a completely unfiltered cap of the clip at 720x480. It was capped via huffyuv (but I recompressed this sample to xvid). I'll try playing with the cap settings a bit more. Raising the res to 720 did seem to help, but after running a few filters there's still reminants of the problem.

http://rapidshare.de/files/29018295/wavylines_unfiltered_720.avi.html

[kakomu]

I'm going to go on a limb here, but it looks like a telecined recording of a telecined recording. Probably a mastering error (which wouldn't surprise me with the old X-men cartoon).

[ShinSan]

Yeah, I'm not surprised as well. I remember several of the old Fox cartoons that have ebil lines on them (like when you draw a diagonal line in MS Paint), but never noticed anything like this when they aired.

I might take a crack at writing a filter to compensate for this eventually. I do have a few ideas on where to start, but nothing I can make into an algorithm yet.

[Trixter]

I'm going to go on a limb here, but it looks like a telecined recording of a telecined recording. Probably a mastering error (which wouldn't surprise me with the old X-men cartoon).

Bingo. As soon as I saw the raw 720 huff (thanks!) I concur. The Spider-Man cartoon from the early 1990s was done with the same production company and suffers from exactly the same thing.