Captured video is telecined. What's a good way to deal w/ this?

[teqnilogik]

I was having a ghosting problem with the video I have been capturing from my PVR TV box when it was played back on DVD on my TV. After a lot of troubleshooting I've narrowed down the problem to the video being telecined. Before I assumed the video was interlaced but this is not the case as I analyzed it frame by frame and it does appear to be telecined. Whenever this telecined video is played back on my DVD players it creates a ghosting effect whenever the interlaced frames appear in the telecined video when there is motion. I'm not sure why this is since I thought DVD players could handle telecined video without a problem but from what I read the DVD player DOES the telecining and the video itself is usually not telecined on the DVD. So the only thing I can think of is that the DVD players are detecting the movie as progressive and not doing any deinterlacing and therefore I see the ghosting and interlaced lines.

What is a good way to deal with this? I've tried doing deinterlacing and inverse telecining with TMPGEnc and the only thing that works and gets rid of the interlaced lines every 3 or so frames is deinterlacing. I haven't gotten inverse telecining to work yet. And also when I encoded as interlaced with TMPGEnc it did appear that the video still had progressive frames and wasn't all interlaced. I don't mind using deinterlace but it probably isn't the most efficient way of getting rid of the telecining. Also I'm not sure if the source would be 29 fps or 24 fps...if it was telecined I imagine 24 fps but this was captured from TV and I thought TV broadcasts were 29 fps. I think it is just my PVR box outputting it as telecined for some reason. If I just deinterlaced the video will TVs handle progressive video well?

I'm not a novice at video encoding or video but all this telecining and interlacing stuff does go over my head a bit. Just need a little advice :)

[Awatef]

To make it as simple as possible for you, here is the deal:

I'm assuming here you live in an NTSC land, so broadcast will be in 29.97fps, so your box will capture that way. Now, you have to make sure your box is capturing in full vertical resolution, say something x 480. That way you're sure there won't be any irrecoverable artefacts.
Now, because you're going to display this on your TV, don't worry about inversing telecine, just go ahead and encode in 29.97fps interlaced, the output will be just perfect, and you won't notice any interlacing nor ghosting (unless the ghosting is part of the original video of course).

That should do for you right now. When you feel like you mastered this, you can begin wondering about IVTC and progressive encoding :)

[teqnilogik]

I tried using TMPGEnc to encode an interlaced MPEG-2 but the output was still telecined. I ended up just using the deinterlace filter then encoding as progressive and that corrected my problem.

[Awatef]

Well, it HAS TO come out interlaced/telecined my friend.
By deinterlacing as you did, you just corrupted the source (instead of "correcting" it), probably making it impossible to apply IVTC later. Indeed, telecined sources shouldn't get deinterlaced at all costs! you choose: keep telecined and encode interlaced (easier for you), or apply IVTC and encode progressive (which is as far as I can see not something you could achieve with your present skills)

[jggimi]

Telecined video *looks* like interlacing artifacts when viewed on a progressive display (such as a computer monitor). But it is not interlaced. Instead, fields from different frames are combined in order to match the timing requirements of analog NTSC equipment.

The software discussed in this tutorial is out-of-date, but the description of Telecined video and inverse telecine techniques should help you understand your content.

www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm

[teqnilogik]

Well I did try to encode interlaced but the content wasn't interlaced from what I could see on my PC. I turned off the deinterlacer in Nero Showtime and it showed no lines other than the telecined lines after 3 or so frames. And I chose interlace as the encode mode in TMPGEnc. I tried Inverse Telecining it but it made the video jerky and missed a few spots. Deinterlacing was the only method I could find that takes care of the ghosting on my TVs because of the telecined content. When it's captured for some reason it's not captured as interlaced and is telecined. I try reencoding it as interlaced and it didn't come out interlaced as I said above.

I know deinterlacing is NOT recommended for removing telecine and when I do movie encoding I either use Force FILM or IVTC but TMPGEnc's Inverse Telecine doesn't seem to be doing the job for me. Also after I inverse telecine I get a 23 fps movie (which I should) but I'm unsure how to put that to a DVD. I believe that enabling 3:2 pulldown on playback should be enabled do that to convert the 23 fps to 29.97 fps for NTFS. Simply deinterlacing keeps it at 29.97 fps.

BTW, thanks for all the help and suggestions.

Edit: Why would a telecined video cause a ghosting effect on my TV? Whenever there is motion there is a ghosting effect that occurs. I'm not sure if the DVD player is trying to deinterlace it and causing this effect or what.

[Awatef]

Well, telecined content is interlaced content, you just don't see the combing in all frames. As you stated, you see it after 3 frames (the pattern is 3 normal frames + 2 combed frames). May be jggimi was not very clear here. There sure is a difference between pure interlaced video and telecined video, but both are interlaced in fact! and as long as you can see the combing, your box did capture in interlaced mode alright.

TMPG's Inverse Telecine function is not very reliable. You better use an AviSynth script for that (with the Decomb plug-in). And then you load that AVS script in TMPG and follow the instructions of the doom9's guide for TMPG (http://www.doom9.org/mpg/tmpg-dvdencoding.htm)

If you said you encoded in interlaced mode and you got ghosting even though you're playing using a standalone DVD player, there is definitely something wrong. You have to make sure that there is no deinterlacing going on at any point of the process. I mean there are dozens of DVDs that are encoded that way, I've never seen ghosting unless it is blended into the fields (something you can see in many older anime DVDs, the older Evangelion DVDs for example -not the remastered ones-)

[teqnilogik]

Well, I opened the MPEG-2 file in DGIndex and it shows it as interlaced, however, it is definitely telecined if I go frame by frame in TMPGEnc or another movie player. It's odd my PVR box is outputting telecined content since all TV content should be 29.97 fps from what I've read. How do I use an avisynth script in TMPGEnc? That guide doesn't mention avisynth script but does give me some nice pointers with TMPGEnc.

Edit: I figured out TMPGEnc reads avs files so I created my own script and am going to test it out tonight.

[Awatef]

It's not odd your PVR box is outputting telecined content. Telecined is indeed 29.97fps! When you inverse the telecine, you get progressive content @23.976fps! I don't know any capture box that is capable of that, so you have to do that manually using AviSynth.

Btw, I salute your courage, and wish you good luck with your experiments :)

[teqnilogik]

Thanks Awatef!

Just a quick question on Avisynth. I've been using Avisynth with AutoGK and other apps but never really wrote my own scripts before. I'm just curious but if I open the AVS file in a movie playing application will it play the movie with the avisynth filters applied and will I be seeing exactly what we would be outputted after encoding with that script?

[teqnilogik]

This is weird. I used telecide and even tried deinterlacing using FieldDeinterlace and it gives me a ghosting effect. Whenever there is motion in the video and there was interlaced frames it gets blurred. This getting a bit frustrating. The only solution I've found so far is to deinterlace with TMPGEnc to get rid of this blurring but that doesn't give me optimum quality. I went back and watched frames of the video and there is definitely 3 progressive and then 2 interlaced frames. I just wish I could get rid of this blurring effect that's added when I'm inverse telecining.

This is the script I used:
LoadPlugin("C:\program files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\Decomb.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\program files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\kerneldeint.dll")

#loadplugin("C:\program files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\avisynth_c.dll")
#loadCplugin("C:\program files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\SmartDecimate.dll")

DirectShowSource("D:\Video Editing\Captured Videos\Export20070611-001.mpg")

Telecide(Order=0,Guide=1,Post=1)
Decimate(Cycle=5)
#KernelDeint(order=1)
#FieldDeinterlace(full=false)

#assumetff()
#SmartDecimate()

I tried other combinations of stuff as well and that stuff has a # before it so it wasn't used during the inverse telecine process I tried.

[Awatef]

A possible problem is that you're using directshowsource, which may use a directshow filter that enables deinterlacing by default.

I would recommend you load your MPG file into DGIndex, save a d2v project, then modify your avs script as follows:

LoadPlugin("C:\program files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\Decomb.dll")
LoadPlugin("...\dgdecode.dll")
MPEG2Source("...\project_name.d2v")
Telecide(guide=1)
Decimate()

No need to change the order & post parameters of Telecide. Decimate() is also just fine.

If you're not successfull with this, upload a small 30 seconds clip showing your problem. You may be confusing ghosting with something else (24p pans for example usually show a "strobe" effect)

[teqnilogik]

Thank you!!! Using the script above works like a charm. It was that DirectShowSource messing it up. I just had to add order=1 to telecide and it works like a charm now. Thanks a lot!