SVCD encoding/Decomb questions

[Bruno]

Hi there, this is my first post to these boards, I'm hoping with the track record of helpfulness I might get closer to discovering what's causing a problem I've been having. I captured and encoded an NTSC laserdisc (Kate Bush "The Line the Cross & the Curve") using my Pinnacle DV500+ DV card and Adobe Premiere. The pertinent settings in my avisynth script were:
FieldDeinterlace (full=true,dthreshold=0)
BilinearResize (480,480)

The problem is when I play back on standalone, I see a kind of jumpiness and ghosting in certain motion scenes. I considered a few possibilities and here's what I did to further test:

1) The field order was wrong. Here's where I have a question...if I use the FieldDeinterlace line above, would this even be possible? I was under the (possibly wrong) impression that deinterlacing eliminated the problem of figuring out which field comes first. I also ran pulldown.exe with switches -tff even and -tff odd to see if there was any improvement, and found none. I would add that the picture doesn't so much look "jittery" as just in certain places "ghosty".

2) The material was telecined. I tested this by stepping thru motion scenes in virtual dub...throughout the capture I found combing, and assumed there were no telecined progressive frames to be had.

3) Some TV or player configuration is causing bad playback. Any ideas if this could be the case?

I've done other capture/encodes (tho mostly using another capture program called Scenalyzer) and have not seen this issue. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[hakko504]

Most likely the material is telecined, have you tried Telecide(post=false) and seen if there is repeated frames in the capture? If you just open the captured AVI (w/o telecide) in VD and look at it then telecined sources will have combing in 3 frames out of 5. Using the above telecide call should remove most combing effects.

Otherwise: fielddeinterlace without blend=false will cause ghosting! If for instance, line 1 and 3 are black and line 2 and 4 are white the blend=true (default) will produce 4 grey lines, whereas blend=false will produce 4 black lines.

[Bruno]

Thanks for your reply. Yeah I did step thru the source .avi without Telecide and found in motion scenes that all frames were combed...that's why I assumed the material wasn't telecined. I'm familiar with ghosting caused by blending, but this is above and beyond anything like that I've encountered. But perhaps I'll test it again the way you outlined and see if that helps. Also, do you know of any way to see these kind of results without having to keep burning to standalone? PowerDVD plays the mpg without these issues.

[Bruno]

OK so now I did a number of tests (6 to be exact) using various forms of telecide and/or fielddeinterlace, and the one that came out almost good was this one:
Telecide (chroma=true)
Decimate (mode=1)

So now my question is this...if I stepped thru the video and saw no uncombed frames, how could I tell that this material would react well to telecide? Obviously this wasn't pure telecined material since the decimate (mode=0) function created jumpiness, which I expected (i.e. the material is true 29.97 fps). What I'm looking for is a way to be able to tell how to handle this kind of material without going thru the process of encoding it 6 different ways and burning to standalone to arrive at the optimum method. Possible?

Again, appreciate anybody's help.

[cow]

Also, do you know of any way to see these kind of results without having to keep burning to standalone?
Not sure if this is what you want, but... I've had excellent results w/ Creative Labs' DXR3 (aka Sigma Design's RealMagic) MPEG card and an S-Video cable to a TV. I can see field-order/jitteriness problems, and I find it very helpful in stuff like testing the effects of filters, etc.