Holy Grail extras - bad telecines?

[Jing]

I am trying to encode the extra goodies found on the second disc in the 2-Disc Special Edition of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", including

-- "Quest for Holy Grail Locations"
-- "BBC Film Report"
-- "Coconut Information"
-- "Holy Grail in Lego"

DVD2AVI reports them to be NTSC interlaced. I tried Field Deinterlace first and it looks OK at first sight, but close inspection showed there are too many artifacts in the resulting AVI files. After reading the IVTC Tutorial several times and all the related material, I went and looked at individual _fields_ (just SeparateFields()), and to my horror even those are interlaced! It looks like they have really screwed it up on this one. So what I want to know is, is there any hope to fix these clips, or is it a lost cause? Has anyone else tried to encode these, and what are your solutions?

Thanks in advance.

[hakko504]

Get the R2 edition from UK. ;)

Seriously, this stuff was interlaced when it was shot in England, thus PAL. And it seems like they have just taken the video, added a few frames (by blending nearby frames) to get the correct speed, and resized it to NTSC. Horrible. Not much you can do though. Try a deinterlacer anyway (in interpolation mode), and some form of spatial smoothing. That wil usually give the best result. Won't be good though, but it's the best you can do with the R1.

[Jing]

Thanks for the reply.

I ended up using the default IVTC procedure: Telecide(guide=1).Decimate(5). It's far from ideal, but the result is tolerable for just extras. I figure the original source material would be either film or PAL video, so this is probably the best I could do.

[Jing]

On second thought, I should probably follow the tutorial and leave it at 29.97fps. I guess I only need Telecide() after all.

[JohnMK]

What about FieldDeinterlace().

[Jing]

Originally posted by JohnMK
What about FieldDeinterlace().
As a matter of fact, that was the first thing I tried, because DVD2AVI identified it as interlaced NTSC, but that resulted in some mixed frames at scene changes. It didn't occur to me to try Telecice() at the time, but it turns out to handle scene changes correctly at least. It's still far from ideal because the whole thing was a mess, but it seems to look better than using FieldDeinterlace(). At least not any worse, and there are no badly mixed frames at scene changes.

[N_F]

Originally posted by Jing
but it turns out to handle scene changes correctly at least.
Try using Fielddeinterlace(blend=false) instead. Does it handle scene changes "correctly"? The "correct" way "should" be fielddeinterlace, but if you think telecide works better than by all means use it.

[Jing]

Originally posted by N_F
Try using Fielddeinterlace(blend=false) instead. Does it handle scene changes "correctly"?

Too late -- I already deleted the VOBs. However, I don't think it would work because this is NOT real interlaced material. Remember that it still has interlace artifacts even after using SeparateFields(), so it definitely requires some kind of blending.

The "correct" way "should" be fielddeinterlace
Why is that?

[N_F]

Sorry, I should have read your first posts more properly before making that post.