Capturing PPV from Japan [in North America]

[whoman421]

I'm a big MIXED MARTIAL ARTS fan, so I capture all of the PAY PER VIEW events. There is a Japanese Kickboxing Organization called K-1, and they recently had a PPV event. When I capture this video and use AVISYNTH to seperate frames, I can see that the 60 fields per second AREN'T from 30 frames...each field shows signs of motion. For ALL OTHER regular video, I only see motion in every OTHER field. It almost appears that this video was prepared as ??? X 240 @ 59.94...and that because of this Interlacing the video was not required.

I only discovered this after trying many different DECOMBING methods to clean up my 704x480 capture. Every time I ended up with VERY blurry images [what seemed to be improperly deinterlaced frames].

Then I decided to capture @ 480 x 240 @ 59.94 FPS in VirtualDub, to see if the frames were just improperly ordered...and no...each individual field appears to be from a completely different frame [60 frames per second?]

Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I changed the channel to SPIKE TV and captured a few seconds of HIGHLANDER. When I looked at the fields, it was capturing correctly...every 2 fields were from the same frame [no motion between the fields].

I was thinking that this might be the 25FPS - > 30FPS conversion, but I would assume that since 25FPS is less then 30FPS, that doesn't make sense [I would expect to see a telecine-like affect, where some fields are repeated twice in the sequence].

Any idea what could be causing this? I have captured Japanese PPV in the past, and it was always @ 30FPS and captured just fine. Why is this K-1 stream different?

[Joe Fenton]

You are running into "live" TV. Sports events are generally shown live, or on a short tape delay. They use actual TV cameras which produce 60 distinctly different fields a second (NTSC).

TV shows are normally filmed and edited for broadcast at some future date. As such, they are normally 24 frames per second. When they are edited for broadcast later, they are telecined and mixed with things like credits and special effects. This makes them MOSTLY 24 frames per second with the addition of material at 30 frames per second. They are never (or rarely) mixed with "live" material, that is, material at 60 fields per second.

Some TV shows are taped in HDTV format. They will be either 24 or 30 frames per second. It is rare to ever find a TV show which isn't live which uses 60 fields per second taping. The move for TVs is toward "progressive" material - it isn't interlaced and is at 24 or 30 frames per second. This replaces the old method of "interlaced" material at 60 fields per second.

[Mug Funky]

some progressive modes for HDTV include 50/60fps progressive as well. so instead of interlaced frames at 25/30, you get progressive frames at 50/60 for the same amount of motion.

you have the option to either de-interlace the footage (there are some good deinterlacers out there), or simply encode it as interlaced (you should be able to find plenty on that option in this forum)