Repairing 'TimeMachined' film

[pawl]

I have lots of sources that I've finally confirmed as being TimeMachined. If you're not familiar with it, here's a link.

TimeMachine (http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,50274,00.html)

Basically the film is sped up slightly by cutting frames to fit in more commercials. It says that only duplicates are deleted, so I was hoping to be able to restore what had been deleted. ivtc'ing them creates parts where it'll speed up for an instant. Very irritating to watch.

I think it's obvious in the interlacing pattern when something has been removed, I'm just not sure what to do about it.

The pattern is 10110 for most, and a break looks like
10110 100 10110

These aren't at scene changes. Any ideas appreciated.

[Guest]

Interesting link. Thanks.

>10110

I can't see the notation that would make this a valid pulldown cycle. If 0 denotes interlaced, then the two interlaced frames should be adjacent.

Please explain your notation.

[pawl]

Sorry, forgot to explain that. 1 = progressive, 0 = interlaced looking at it with tmpgenc's ivtc tool.

Looking at the frames normally it will be 2 interlaced followed by 3 progressive, with the occassional 2 int and 2 prog.

I can provide a clip if needed.

[Guest]

You could probably write a filter that would be able to restore some of the missing frames, but it would also probably do erroneous extra restores, because tracking the pattern in the presence of noise, bad edits, hybrid material, etc., is a heuristic exercise. I have a similar problem in Telecide.

I sure hope this practice does not become widespread. At least Decomb can handle the irregular patterns that result from it (guide=0). :)

[trbarry]

It would probably be doable but this sort of thing could turn into an absolute nightmare. You wouldn't know at the beginning know how many frames you were supposed to have and the time machine parts might or might not apply to the commercials themselves, which in turn could be video source. It would maybe require an entire extra pass to do automatically.

But I do believe it is becoming more common and will probably be a factor in future HDTV caps.

In extreme cases we might just have to do telecide without decimate like in some mixed clips.

- Tom

[pawl]

Hehe, well considering it'll make the stations a few extra pennies, I have no doubt that it will become commonplace.

I was extremely pessimistic about an automated solution already, but do you guys have any suggestions for doing doing it manually? Telecide(guide=0) and no Decimate does do by far the job of any deinterlacing solution tried, but I still notice oddness in the motion.

The sources are mpeg2 extracts from tivo, and I *think* the frames are properly flagged interlaced or progressive. I don't mind putting in whatever time I need to get the pattern exactly right. However, being somewhat of a novice, I don't know where to go from there :)