Restoring De-Interlaced Video?

[odedia]

Hi folks.

I have a problem and i hope you could perhaps help me out.
A few years ago, when i was just starting out with video editing, I made the grave error of enconding my trip to the USA with "De-Interlace" on, and setting it to "odd fields only". I reason i did this was because I didn't know back then about the "Bottom field first" setting that i should use for DV files. So the MPEG2's came out fuzzy, and that's the best i could come up with. Now i have the video is "OK" quality, but it's jumpy, just as you would deinterlace every other movie and set it to odd fields only. The bigger problem - I don't have the source material, since the tape was torn apart months ago.

My question is, is there ANY type of solution that can somehow improve this video? I know i won't be able to completly restore it, since i killed half the source material while enconding, but perhaps there are some filters or avisynth scrips that can help me out?

The source DV and output MPEG2 were 29.970 NTSC.

Any help would be great. Thanks.

Oded S.

[mustardman]

Why is your result so crappy? I would blame the MPEG encoding, not the de-intelacing. It does not really matter if you select the odd or even fields for basing the de-interlace on.

De-interlacing video source will throw away mostly temporal information, as well as of course spatial information. This makes a video look more like film, and you start to notice slight jerkyness when slow panning.

I'd say your problems with fuzzyness are probably due to the MPEG encoding, although some fuzzyness will of course come about because you have halved your vertical resolution.

But the "jumpy" effect you talk of, are you talking vertical jumping (sync problems) or the jerkyness on panning?

I have done field doubling (removing every second field all together) because one of the video heads died while recording. Hence, the original picture looked like noise. However, every odd field was good. I captured, replaced the even fields with copies of the odd fields, and the result is fantastic, although the sync is a bit funny because the capture card has a real hard time dealing with only half a valid sync signal!

[odedia]

Hi.

Perhaps I was wrong at my explanations. The picture quality is OK - I mean, yes the mpeg encoding is not superb but it's quite satisfaing. the only problem i have is the jerkyness due to the field doubling of one of the fields. my question was - is there any way to "smooth" this jerkyness? you may refer to this exactly as you refered to the problem YOU had, cause we pretty much did the same thing - threw away half the fields.

Thanks!

Oded S.

[bb]

You'd need a program which can double the framerate and interpolate every second frame through motion estimation. I think MotionPerfect can do this.

bb

[mustardman]

MotionPerfect is not free, unless you know....

However, there are excellent plugins for VirtualDub (and can be imported to AVISynth) that do a really excellent job. (IMO better than MotionPerfect)

However, none of these things are capture on the fly, they are post-processing programs. Perhaps FFvfw or FFdshow has some de-interlacing filters???

[morsa]

What filter for Virtualdub does the same as MotionPerfect?????
Could you tell us?

[mustardman]

Mmmm. I may have given you the wrong impression. I don't know of any VDub filters that can do frame interpolation, only ones that do double framerate de-interlacing (and do a marvellous job).

I guess my main comment was that MotionPerfect is a 'pay for' program.

[morsa]

Well, but you can try it to see if it fits your needs.
If you live in Australia I guess 50 American dollars aren't impossible...