Pulldown tip...

[TRILIGHT]

Some of you may or may not be aware of this but since it drove me nuts tonight, I thought I'd share with those that don't...

Big tip coming up... are you ready?...

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE FIELD ORDER USING PULLDOWN.EXE IF YOU HAVE ALREADY PERFORMED THE "PULLDOWN" FUNCTION ON YOUR 23.976FPS FILE!

I have been beating my head against the wall trying to figure out what went wrong. I had to re-encode a "making of" type extra on this DVD. After all was said and done, and I checked the playback on my standalone, the video on this extra was terrible! It's something that some people consider subtle. I nearly had a seizure just looking at the weird jittery picture! ;) It was like a REAL BAD refresh rate on a monitor. I'm sure this is what people refer to when they say you will get "jaggies" along diagonal lines because that was there too.

It's all about the field order. If it's wrong, this is what you will get. In order to correct it, you can use PULLDOWN.EXE. However, as I said before, do NOT attempt to do this on the resulting file if you have already run pulldown on it. When I did this, my ~19min file kept being reported as ~15min in the authoring program. Needless to say, it was not synched with the audio either.

If you need to change the field order (ie. if you were going too fast and screwed up the field order like me ;) ) then do so before the final "pulldown". You can do this as follows...

PULLDOWN.EXE file1.m2v tempfile.m2v -tff even -nopulldown

You will use "even" or "odd" depending on which corrects your problem. The important thing is that you do not actually perform the "pulldown" yet. For your final output for importing into the authoring software (ie. the actual pulldown), you would enter this...

PULLDOWN.EXE tempfile.m2v finaloutput.m2v

PULLDOWN defaults to interlaced so if your source is progressive, enter this...

PULLDOWN.EXE tempfile.m2v finaloutput.m2v -prog_frames p

Anyway, this may all sound long-winded and some of you could probably care less but someday someone's going to screw up like I did and when they do a search (everyone searches before they post ?'s right?? hehe ;) ) then they will find this first.

[Milkman Dan]

Yeah, no kidding.

What makes this worse is that CCE's "top field first" tickbox is broken, and it always encodes TFF, no matter what. I don't think they've fixed it yet either.

[TRILIGHT]

Holy crap! Really? I wasn't aware of that. Good to know info!

[jaffree]

I had same problem when re-encoding interlaced movie in CCE.
The video was 'Bottom Field First' and interlaced.
I used Field Order 'none' in dvd2avi, then imported project in
tmpg, performed IVTC (i kept the field bottom first), then
imported tpr in cce via vfapi, disabled Top Field First and enocded.

After encoding, I did pulldown, changed field order with pulldown.exe
but the problem remained the same. I also tried to use Derim's Field Changer to swap field order, but did not work either.

I think I did it wrong at the first place in dvd2avi.

Am I thinking right?

So far, I haven't correct that problem yet.

Any quick hints?

[TRILIGHT]

I can't speak too much about Tmpeg because I don't use it. In fact, I hate the hell out of it and don't see how anyone uses it with it's 12hr+ encoding times and continuous lock-ups.

You may actually need to de-interlace your video. Now, that's not necessarily to say that you should select "progressive" when encoding. I recently had a problem re-encoding an extra from "Enemy at the Gates". It was the one called "Through the Crosshairs". Anyway, Bitrate viewer showed it as Interlaced. I figured since it was going to be on TV anyway, it should stay interlaced. Well, I ended up with the same sort of crap I described here. I tried changing the field order and everything and nothing would correct it. Finally, I chose to de-interlace it using the Avisynth filter Decomb.dll. Worked like a charm!

Now, if I load up the VOB that was created from this "de-interlaced" video, it shows up just as the original was reported. Bitrate viewer returns that the frame type is "Interlaced". Go figure! I can't say why it worked, it just did. That's my story and I'm sticking to it! ;)

Anyway, I suggest you try using Avisynth instead of VFAPI. I'm learning more and more everyday how versatile it is. It's fairly simple to use as long as your script is correct. The "installation" of Avisynth, mpeg2dec.dll, and decomb.dll is a no-brainer, really. From there, all you have to do is create a text file with a .avs extension and load that .avs file into CCE for encoding. This allows for a "one-shot" encoding path while doing all the tricky stuff in the script. The one I used for the EATG extra was as follows...


LoadPlugin("C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\mpeg2dec.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\decomb.dll")
mpeg2source("D:\MOVIES\ENEMYATTHEGATES\EATG-vob2.d2v")
FieldDeinterlace()
ResampleAudio(44100)


Like I said, worked like a charm. :) I suggest trying to de-interlace the video if changing your field order isn't working. That may fix it for you.

[Mosaic]

I dont have CCE so I Use Tmpgenc......

I'm having probs with Swars & Jurassic park ...first attempts at reauthoring....

Its seems that I am geting irregular fields when I use 3:2 pulldown on playback.

Do you suggest that I use noninterlace for the output instead?

these films are not interlcaed.

If I should run into an Interlaced movie ...should I de-interlace the m2v 1st b4 reencoding or rencode & deinterlace with Tmpgenc at the same time?