NTSC Cap, Farscape Peacekeeper Wars

[Bardez]

I capped the recent Farscape mini-serires sunday and monday night, and the interlace on it is completely funky. Everything I've tried ends up with blurred frames or looks completely choppy.

A sample can be found here. (http://www.ilstu.edu/~epfrant/fs_non_video_2.avi)

From what I've heard, it might be a PAL-> NTSC conversion, but nothing seems to help in that department.

I've tried Telecide and decomb, Restore24, RePal, and various other deinterlacing techniques, but nothing seems to look satisfying.

Any ideas? (I'm a relatively quick learn since I've been using AVI Synth for awhile... advanced help won't be too scary)

[Mug Funky]

don't they shoot this show in Australia? if that's the case (i know half the cast is from here), then it most probably is a PAL-->NTSC conversion. i'm just downloading the sample now.

[edit]

WHOA! there's not a single field in that cap that isn't blended.

all i can really recommend for this movie is to buy the PAL DVD... cause you're not going to get much out of this one. blends can theoretically be cancelled out, but there's no tools available to do this yet (maybe if i get a lightning bolt of inspiration i'll resurrect my own attempt to get rid of blends).

[Bardez]

I'm a bhaalfordamned idiot. It was an average of two caps, and the fields were off for some reason. I replaced the sample here. (http://www.ilstu.edu/~epfrant/fs_non_video_2.avi) It's about 15 meg (HuffYUV, 73 frames) It seems that the video is 1 "good" or progressive frame followed by 5 blended-field frames

Yes it was filmed in Australia, so it should be PAL -> NTCS (I would think)

[Mug Funky]

aaaaaaaaaaaah. that'll do it... out-of-sync caps overlayed.

i'm downloading the next one. i might try some denoising experiments on it too.

[edit]

on the few frames i had to play with, this worked perfectly:

AVISource("C:\Ack\fs_non_video_2.avi")
assumetff()
fixbrokenchromaupsampling()
tdeint(1,1)

restore24(last,last,2500,5994)

i noticed chroma combing that seems to have occured before huffy compression, so i put "fixbrokenchromaupsampling" in there to fix it.

enjoy! all you need do is crop nicely and whack some denoisers in there (actually, it might be better to crop before Tdeint).

remember, you'll need Tdeint for this script to work, or you could replace it with another smart-bob.

[Bardez]

That doesn't seem to work for the overall video, unfortunately. However, my best results so far come from:

SeparateFields()
AssumeFrameBased()
RemoveBlend(parameters)
AssumeFieldBased()


This gives me a blend every here and there, but it's not noticeable during playback.
However, Weaving them back together is an amazing pain. Sometimes it looks good, others it looks like it weaved back to interlaced, others it looks like an interlace of 3 frames (!)

Any way, here's (http://www.ilstu.edu/~epfrant/fs_field_divx3.avi) a sample clip, (DIVX3 so it's longer) ~5 meg

Should I decimate before weaving, after? Using Remove Blend on frames doesn't seem to help nearly as much as it does on fields, just to explain why I did it like this..

[Mug Funky]

oh, one thing i should mention - on the test clip, loading from a non-zero frame (hitting f5 in virtualdubmod's script editor) seemed to throw off restore24's pattern matching. this may be why it didn't work for the whole video.

removing blends on field-separated video will give you little pixel jumps whenever a blend is removed (quite often), so it's best to de-blend smart-bobbed video.

restore24 is basically pattern-guided blend removal and decimation, so it should work better than a simple removeblend. so before you do your final encode i'd give restore24 another go, loading from the beginning (f7 in VDM's script editor, or simply load the avs file :)).

[Bardez]

I finally got acceptable results, using the following script, if any one is interrrested:


(Averaged fields of two caps via overlay, treat as SeparateFields() )
DoubleWeave()
RePal()
Telecide(order=1,guide=2)


then for the few combed frames left over, virtualdub's deinterlace worked but didn't comprosmise quality much. As just for a note, every test with (smart)Bobbed video ended up looking horrible, so I used doubleweave instead. RePal let a few combed frames thru, telecide worked great for that. and for the occasional one that got thru that, VDub's deint took care without worsening the video

Thanks for all the help; even if i didn't end up using the above-posted meathod, it definately poitned me in the right direction