jaggies on DV sports footage

[kevinm]

For a while now I have been using Xesdeeni’s Standards Conversion Script (‘Poor Man's PAL<>NTSC script’) to convert from NTSC DV footage to PAL. I use avisynth to frameserve to TMPGenc.

These 'jaggies' have been bugging me for a while, I have tried various filters but to be honest I am new at all this and I think I really need to try to understand the cause of the jaggies in the first place. It may be that I am not be applying the correct filters.

Up till now I have suspected that the 'jaggies' were an inherent feature of the standards conversion process but on closer examination I see now that they originate from the original NTSC DV footage. These ‘jaggies’ show up where I am panning the camera and usually much worse when there is a lot of motion involved. I capture the DV from my Canon Elura50 camcorder using Windv over firewire, Windv never reported that any frames were dropped.

I have been reading up in this forum and I am wondering if this is just an effect of interlacing. I have read about 'chroma and combing' but to be honest I am not sure what this phenomena actually is. I have also read that the processing required will be depend on whether I intend to play on my computer or on TV from my DVD player.

I have tried modifying the script to use Reinterpolate411 but it doesn't seem to help, but maybe I am misunderstanding what the problems actually is.

I have taken a screen shot from TMPGenc preview which shows the jaggies quite nicely. For this I simply loaded the DV AVI (type2) in TMPGenc and used preview with the filters turned off.

Could someone please take a look at the attached jpg and give me some opinions on the cause of the jaggies in my source AVI, then I will hopefully have a better idea of what filters I might need to use,

many thanks,

Kevin

[bb]

The jaggies look like regular interlace combing. Have you read about interlacing already?

bb

[kevinm]

BB,
I have read about interlacing but wasn't sure if that was what it was being caused by, thanks.

I have been using the following, which I thought was needed for interlaced video but it doesn’t get rid of the jaggies ..

AVISource("G:\clip.avi")
Trim(1, 200)
ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=true)
ReInterpolate411()
SeparateFields()
odd=SelectOdd.Convolution3D(1, 6, 10, 6, 8, 2.8, 0)
evn=SelectEven.Convolution3D(1, 6, 10, 6, 8, 2.8, 0)
Interleave(evn,odd)
Weave()
DoubleWeave.SelectOdd()

So, thinking that what I needed to do was deinterlace I added the following line before the Reinterpolate step ..

# Deinterlace
SmoothDeinterlace(tff=false, doublerate=true)

I can see that with this it does somewhat 'smooth out' the jaggies but I also see frames where there are two completely different images 'blended' together and I am not sure if this in fact looks worse.

If I am only intending to watch the final footage on TV should I miss out the deinterlace step?

thanks,

Kevin

[Peter1234]

kevinm,
Read this if you haven't already: http://www.100fps.com/

[kevinm]

Peter1234,

That was an excellent article. I have read before about much that was discussed in the article but only as individual topics, it is great to read an article that explains how it all fits together.

So to summarize what I have as my starting point and what I am ultimately trying to do:

1) Original footage is NTSC DV material (with lots of motion).
2) I want to transfer to DVD for playing on my NTSC TV, I might occasionally play on my computer but TV will be my main display.
3) Also I need to convert to PAL so my family abroad can play on their PAL DVD player/TV (unfortunately their DVD player can’t handle NTSC disks even if they are made region free)

So from reading that article you pointed me to (http://www.100fps.com/) I have come to the conclusion that:

For playing my on my NTSC DVD player/TV, since I wont be changing frame rate or resizing it I will leave it as INTERLACED.
For playing on my family’s PAL TV abroad, since I will be changing the frame rate and resizing I will have to DE-INTERLACE it.


For the NTSC>PAL converted video I was hoping I could improve on the blurry/blended frames but I see now that I must deinterlace and even with smoothening there is a limit to what you can do. Maybe things are made worse because the original footage is from a hand held DV camcorder.

I will go away and research avisynth filters again, perhaps I can try some different deinterlacers or experiment with the switches/options to improve the result of my converted video.

Thanks for you help,

Kevin

[Peter1234]

kevinm,
I think you understand now. There is no perfect deinterlacer, so leaving as interlaced is best for viewing on TV. Search this site for scripts to convert to PAL. Using filters with interlaced video requires separating fields as you have done, so scripts are simpler if you deinterlace first.