Pulldown & progressive source

[smoof]

I wanted to mention something about using Pulldown (I'm using 0.99d) that I didn't see mentioned in the DVD guides. I didn't see this explicitly mentioned in the forums either so here goes...

If your source material is progressive frames and you used force film in DVD2AVI, then when you use pulldown after reencoding (to convert back to 29.97 fps) you need to specify the "-prog_seq p" and "-prog_frames p".

If you don't do this then the resulting .mpv file will be marked as interlaced. According to the readme file that comes along with pulldown, this is the default behaviour. You can verify this by using BitRate on the resulting .mpv file.

You won't notice any problems on your PC, but when you play the DVD on your NTSC TV you will notice the problem when you single step frames. On 16x9 movies you will see the bottom line (before the black bars start) flicker. You will also notice stair stepping problems on diagonal objects.

I'm new to this so while it may seem obvious to some, it's probably not obvious to beginners like myself.

[Inwards]

By default pulldown.exe marks each frame with an rff as interlaced, as well as marking the whole stream as interlaced. This is the default behavior mainly because that is what the SVCD spec mandates. Setting both seqences and frames to progressive will work fine in Maestro, but causes problems in Scenarist (you need to leave the sequences as interlaced).

The interlacing artifacts that you're seeing on your standalone seem to be specific to certain players. On my Pioneer 525 I don't see it, but on a friend's 444 it's certainly noticable.

According to the DVD specs, both pulldown.exe's default behavior and -prog_frames p -prog_seq p are legal.

[smoof]

The method I described above worked fine on my RCA standalone but was causing jumpy video on my Sony standalone & PS2. So I took a test clip and made a bunch of different segments using different pulldown parameters. What I found was that the Sony players didn't like "-prog_seq p" setting. So I want to ammend my previous recommendation:

When your movie is progressive use the following pulldown command to eliminate the top & bottom line flicker:

pulldown source.mpv destination.mpv -prog_frames p


Another thing I noticed is that if you don't set the frames to progressive, when you single step you will notice that every other frame seems a little blurry (look at any fine details that are in the scene). This happens on both my RCA and Sony standalone. When the frames are set as progressive, they look sharp when single stepping.

[TRILIGHT]

Hopefully someone can help me. I used "pulldown" for the first time. Everything seemed to go just fine. I authored with DVD Maestro and everything seemed ok. However, when I play it on the DVD I burned, it all seems vertically stretched! Something must have gone wrong with the 16:9 / 4:3 settings but I have no idea where. The original source was a 16:9 DVD. Can anyone tell me where I might have went wrong? The only reason I think it might be "pulldown" that did something is because every other time I've ripped, encoded, and authored, I've not had any problems. Help!

[SiC]

more than likely you didn't set DVD Maestro to 16:9 (it defaults to 4:3).

[TRILIGHT]

Damn!! I feel stupid as hell now! hehe :) That's exactly what I did. I guess it hasn't been an issue in the past since the stuff I've worked with was always 4:3. Sorry for the stupid question. Thanks for being kind enough to overlook it and point me in the right direction! :)