480i60 to 720p60 conversion with proper deinterlacing and deblocking

[Maxiuca]

I know those deinterlacing topics are getting boring and that many things have been discussed over and over in tens of threads, but even though I'm not new to AviSynth or video processing I found after couple of hours of searching and reading that what I'm trying to achieve overwhelms me.

The task seems simple: I've got a 480i60 (16/9) footage that has been encoded with MPEG-2 (VBR with average bitrate about 6 Mbps) and I want to deblock it, deinterlace it (with double framerate) and upscale to 720p60.

The footage was recorded with a Digital Betacam camcorder with good lenses and enough lighting, so it has decent quality and the original recording didn't have much noise.
Since the original Digibeta tapes don't exist anymore, I'd like to preserve and archive this footage as 720p60 Blu-ray encode. I'm actually hoping that some of those nice avisynth filters will do much better job in deblocking, deinterlacing and resizing than most (all) real-time processors in TVs, DVDs, receivers and so on.

Which filters and methods would you recommend? There are so many possibilities (mvbob, mcbob, TDeint, kerneldeint, SecureBob, TomsMoComp and many others) that I'm really lost.

[JohannesL]

Post a sample.

[Maxiuca]

Most of the footage consists of interviews, but there are also several shots with some "action" as well as some camera pans.

Here are some samples:

http://maxiuca.com/footage_samples.rar (24 MB)

[scharfis_brain]

how much processing time are you willing to invest?

also please mind that the footage already has been converted from 50 fps to 60i.
so you might have a better starting footage, if you could find the PAL-Version of it (which also has a greater vertical resolution of 576 lines)

[Ghitulescu]

Stupid answer: BD allows DVD resolutions (720x480x59.94 4:3/16:9), why not store the clips as such with no reencoding? If the image is so good as you say even the worst scaler would yield a decent image ... And 6Mbps if done with a profi MPEG-2 encoder should look very good, even if fed by analogue and not SDI.
Why 720p and not 1080i? At least you don't have to do yourself the deinterlacing ... and most TVs/projectors are already 1080 ...
The best were, as scharfis_brain said, to have access to the original tapes, you would have then only one encoding to perform, if you still insist on HD.

[Maxiuca]

how much processing time are you willing to invest?

I'm not constrained by any time limits. I've got a computer with Core 2 Quad 2.66 Ghz and 2 GBs of RAM that can be calculating it even for a week.

how much processing time are
also please mind that the footage already has been converted from 50 fps to 60i.
so you might have a better starting footage, if you could find the PAL-Version of it (which also has a greater vertical resolution of 576 lines)
Hmm, that is what I suspected since the footage was made in Europe. Although I didn't know how to check it. Was it shot in interlace 50i mode or progressive 25 fps? Is there any way to get back to 50 Hz? Maybe RePAL or something?

I don't think I'd be able to get a PAL-Version or any other version. This is everything I've got.

[Maxiuca]

Ghitulescu,

you are right, but the image is far from perfect, since the encode is not too good. I dunno what encoder was used, but there is some blocking. From my experience with video processors (I own DVDO Edge, Toshiba HD-XE1 with Reon, Harman-Kardon receiver with Faroudja and Oppo DV-980H upscaling DVD player) most of the scalers in "standard equipment" do not deliver decent quality. That's why I'd like to try some of those magical AviSynth filters.

[Mug Funky]

it it's just talking heads, i reckon you wont need one of the motion-compensated super scripts.

i think nnedi2+yadifmod will handle this pretty well.

also, digibeta cameras tend to have some vertical filtering happening (maybe to prevent field-flicker?), so this will help hide deinterlace artefacts should they occur (in this type of footage you'd only barely see artefacts on fast-moving hands - everything else should be best-case scenario for deinterlacing).

it goes without saying, but please keep a copy of the source you're using. i can't see why the originals would be thrown out. they'd surely exist somewhere unless some bright spark thought they could save a few bucks in GEC times by recycling all that old stuff (i hope this is not the case, as you never know where one of those tape has been and what damage it's picked up along the way).