Converting old telecine to 24p

[tygerbug]

https://archive.org/details/mr-piper...pipers-house-1

Hi folks, how would you handle a telecine like this? (Check the VOB rather than the MP4 preview, if you can.) In AviSynth or otherwise.

While the animation is very limited and doesn't move much, a close examination reveals that this is a very old telecine of the film material, with lots of frame ghosting, which will not convert easily to 24p.

Check the bouncing face in the opening titles, for example. It's not a standard 3:2 pulldown. It's ghostier and looser than that. It is not PAL.

I'm interested in making a clean 24p version for pairing with a possible B&W HD film scan in the future. I'll also be boosting the faded color as best I can, but will handle that separately.

[hello_hello]

It looks like a standard PAL to NTSC field blended conversion to me. I don't think it'll ever be perfect due to the lack of motion in many places and the blending pattern appears to change now and then.

I didn't try to adjust the color, just clean up the lines a little. For that sort of thing you'd be better off splitting it into sections to treat the live action stuff differently. I used the following script to encode the sample. If you need 24 fps you can add AssumeFPS(24) to the end of the script but you'll have to slow the audio down to match.

http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Srestore
http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Stab

mpeg2Source("Mr Piper Pied Pipers House1.d2v")

A = TDeint(mode=1).SRestore().Stab()
B = MergeChroma(A.aWarpSharp2(Depth=20), A.aWarpSharp2(Depth=50)).FastLineDarkenMod4()

B.Trim(0, 630) + A.Trim(631, 1140) + B.Trim(1141, 8185)
CropResize(0,0, 4,6,-16-4, ResizeWO=true, InDAR=15.0/11.0)

Mr Piper Pied Pipers House1.mkv

Edit: I tried to fix the bouncing face with a function manually and didn't have any luck getting it right.

[tygerbug]

Tried to install everything mentioned. Haven't used AviSynth in awhile. VirtualDub2 and AviSynth+.

Video is not PAL (it's just a badly synced 24fps transfer) and should not be cropped/resized so I made some minor changes.

[hello_hello]

Check the live sections. I'm pretty sure they're 25fps. Of course I could be wrong, but I think the live action was smoother at 25ps as there was an occasional dropped frame if they're de-blended to 24fps. Or alternatively, if you deblend to 25fps you can step through the live sections to see if there's duplicates.

Keep in mind... SRestore needs to run through the video in a linear fashion. If you navigate back and forth while previewing the script it won't work correctly.

The MergeChroma line in your script can't work as you haven't defined "A", so you'll need to remove them, but I'd be trying to avoid applying the line darkening to the live sections.

MergeChroma(A.aWarpSharp2(Depth=20), A.aWarpSharp2(Depth=50)).FastLineDarkenMod4()

The first line should have backward slashes if you're using Windows, shouldn't it?

mpeg2Source("F:\Mr_Piper.....")

You can't open vob files directly with mpeg2source, as far as I know. You'll need to open them with DGIndex to create an index file (a d2v file for mpeg2source to open).

I don't know why you're seeing an SMDegrain error given it's not included in the script. Try deleting everything from your script and typing Version(). If you still get SMDegrain and SRestore errors it'll be a problem with the functions themselves, but it seems odd.

Field blending was often used to convert PAL to NTSC. It's virtually pointless to convert progressive 24fps to 60i using field blending though when you can do it with standard 2:3 pulldown, no blending required. I gather it was a Canadian show (NTSC), but apparently it was very popular in the UK (PAL) and given how old it is anything's possible when it comes to the source used for the DVD.

I'd be interested to learn why it shouldn't be cropped/resized as that's really just personal preference. Won't you have to crop and resize if you're planning to combine the DAD video with a HD source?