Getting the most out of CCE--FPS Issues

[p3distxii]

Following the guide always leaves me with an mpv that is 24fps. I have to use pulldown.exe to convert it back to 29fps. Essentially I am losing frames and this is evident during fast action scenes where the video appears choppy. Is there a way to just encode at 29fps? The DVD2AVI part of the guide is a little tricky. I've been using "Forced Film". Is this what is causing the 24fps encode? I'll try without forced film on my next project, but if anyone has any insight, please post.

BTW, I tried to post this 3 times in the "DVD encoding" forum but for some reason I can't post there. Apparently nobody else can either since the last post was on 8-3-02.

[adam]

Pulldown.exe does not convert your film to 29.97fps, it adds a 3:2 pulldown flag to your video so that when your dvd player plays it, it telecines it in real time to 29.97fps. You lose nothing but you gain an exta %20 bitrate since you had %20 less frames to encode. You physically see the same thing, but you are allowing the dvd player to do a share of the work, so with more bitrate to work with your quality is significantly better.

Yes forced film in dvd2avi is what is giving you the 24fps (23.976fps actually.) What's probably happening is one of two things. You may be using a non stable version of dvd2avi and it is actually frameserving your file at 24fps, which is wrong. Version 1.76 is definitely stable. A new official version was released and it may be just as stable, but if your having problems I would stick to 1.76 until you figure out where the problem lies.

Another possibility is that you are using forced film incorrectly. It will not work on all sources. For most ntsc dvds the film is stored at 23.976fps and it uses RFF/TFF flags to tell the dvd player to telecine it to 29.97fps as it plays, just as the 3:2 pulldown does for svcds. To verify that your dvd is like this preview your vobs and let it get past the opening credits. If it says %95 of higher film and stays steady then enable forced film and encode at 23.976fps and use the 3:2 pulldown flag. If it shows anything else you need to uncheck forced film and encode at 29.97fps or attempt to do an inverse telecine to bring your video back down to 23.976fps.

The way forced film works is by basically disabling those RFF/TFF flags. So if your film is actually stored at 23.976fps it will be frameserved at the framerate. If it is stored at 29.97fps interlaced than dvd2avi will have no choice but to decimate certain frames, which will result in choppy playback in the final encoded file.

[p3distxii]

Both films in question ("Gladiator" and "The Royal Tenenbaums") displayed "FILM" in the preview and said about 65% and incresed VERY SLOWLY. I let them get to about 85% and figured (ASS-umed) they'd end up getting past 95% so I enabled "Forced Film" which apparently was a bad decision. On my next project I will go without Forced Film unless it goes over 95% fairly quickly. Thanks for your help Adam.