Weird "stop motion" effect occuring...

[TRILIGHT]

Ok, I am not attempting to "cross-post" (I posted something in the Avisynth forum), but what I'm seeing may be a encoding or authoring problem so I thought I'd ask here too...

Well, I haven't seen this one before. My oringal source material is listed as pure NTSC when I created my DVD2AVI .d2v project file. I chose no field order. I used the following script to encode in CCE...

LoadPlugin("C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\mpeg2dec.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\decomb.dll")
mpeg2source("D:\MOVIES\TAHS\project.d2v")
FieldDeinterlace()
Sharpen(0.5)
ResampleAudio(44100)

The resulting video, while fine in most respects, ended up having a weird "stop-motion" type effect on it. For the most part, it looks fine. However, every now and then (usually when someone is walking around on screen), it's like there is a brief delay or a missing frame that I don't know how to decribe. The best I can say is it's like a "stop motion" or "ghosting" effect, only it isn't. Has anyone seen this sort of weird behavior and know how to get rid of it?

[TRILIGHT]

Ok, I just noticed a bit more info that isn't random. I stepped through the playback frame by frame and it seems to follow a 2 frame, 3 frame pattern... 112221122211222 ...where the number 1's indicate frames that seem to have a "blur" or distortion in them during movement and the number 2's indicate frames that look fine. Any hints?

[TRILIGHT]

Well, it looks like I may have corrected it myself. I am still having trouble with some of the text that appears on screen but thought I'd post for anyone following this thread. (Although I'm just talking to myself. ;) ) Anyway, I changed my script and instead of using:
FieldDeinterlace()
I'm now using:
Telecide(guide=1)
Decimate(cycle=5)
This seems to have worked MUCH better. Each frame looks good now (except for the text problem I mentioned). Also, the problem is obviously linked with the interlacing of the original NTSC video. I stepped through frame by frame on the original and though it plays perfectly fine, there was the same weird distorion in the same pattern I mentioned.

[hakko504]

Just guessing, but: Could it be that the original source was FILM which then has been telecined to NTSC and the text has been added after telecining? If it then was encoded as NTSC DVD2AVI would think it is pure NTSC whereas it only is the text that is NTSC.
Telecining and NTSC would have the following frame patterns:
1t1b 1t2b 2t3b 3t4b 4t4b (Telecining)
1t1b 2t2b 3t3b 4t4b 5t5b (NTSC)
NOw, if you add a text that ends at frame 3/NTSC, then that would only be visible in the bottom field of frame 3/FILM and this could be a source of your problems with text. If the text only appears in certain parts of the picture you maybe should play with the y0 and y1 parameters of Telecide to make telecide disregard the text when IVTCing. Also using blend=false might clear up the text (or remove it!)

[TRILIGHT]

I'm pretty sure it was originally NTSC as it was originally a "made for TV" movie. Thanks for the info! I'm learning more and more about Avisynth all the time. I used to wonder what the big deal was but the advantage being able to use a script is GREAT! :)

[tom para]

"made for TV" d/o necessarily means it was shot on video. Could have been shot on film, telecined to tape, encoded to mpv with IVT 3:2 pulldown, and de-IVT by DVD player. OR, film and video could have been mixed together in editing. That said, I suspect you're having an IVT and/or progressive/interlaced problem. Even the best IVT box has problems w/ mixed film/video.

pls report your findings. Am very interested to hear more.

[TRILIGHT]

Hey Tom. Thought I'd let you know what I ended up with. For those wondering, the title I am working with is "The Audrey Hepburn Story". The final script I used was as follows...
LoadPlugin("C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\mpeg2dec.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\decomb.dll")
mpeg2source("D:\MOVIES\TAHS\project.d2v")
Telecide(guide=1)
Decimate(cycle=5)
Sharpen(0.3)
ResampleAudio(44100)
Basically, the 0.5 setting was just a touch more than what I wanted for my taste. It's perfect, actually. The resulting video looks better than the original. Now that I have a better understanding of what's going on, it makes sense. The anomaly I noticed was that every 4th and 5th frame out of 5 showed up as what appeared to be an interlaced frame of two different pictures. The "cycle=5" setting on the decimate subroutine tells it to drop every 5th frame. The postprocessing of telecide deinterlaces the remaining combed frame. It's brilliant, actually! The programmers of these DLL's really know their stuff! The resulting video looks GREAT. I was worried at first that it would not be in sync with the audio if frames were dropped. Not the case though. It is perfectly in sync with the AC3 extracted audio file all the way through the end.

As for the text problem I mentioned earlier, it is more a combination of two things. First, the original text was not done very well to begin with. It also has a screwed up look on screen. Coupled with my use of the sharpen filter, the effect was exaggerated. It's not really bad enough for me to want to change anything though.