PAL 576i to NTSC 480i conversion

[zambelli]

I apologize for rehashing an old topic, but searching the forums I couldn't find any recent discussion of it so I thought it might be a good idea to revisit it.

My goal is to convert a 720x576 interlaced PAL MPEG2 video captured from European DTV to an NTSC compliant 720x480 interlaced video. Why interlaced? Well, I'm guessing that'd be the best way to preserve the video quality, but I suppose I could be persuaded otherwise.

Anyway, searching the forums and googling the Internet the script that most commonly comes up is this one:

SmoothDeinterlace(tff=true, doublerate=true)
BilinearResize(720, 480)
ChangeFPS(59.94)
SeparateFields()
SelectEvery(4, 1, 2)
Weave()

For a start, I can't seem to find a version of SmoothDeinterlacer compatible with Avisynth 2.5. So I replaced SmoothDeinterlace with DGBob, hoping to accomplish the same effect. Here's my script:

DGBob(order=1, mode=1, thresh=12, ap=false)
LanczosResize(720, 480)
ChangeFPS(59.94)
SeparateFields()
SelectEvery(4, 1, 2)
Weave()

However, the end result is not very pleasing. The picture looks very soft (probably as a result of DGBob's interpolation) and there is noticable shimmering in many frames.

What's the optimal way of converting interlaced PAL to interlaced NTSC? Would I get better results by simply deinterlacing the PAL video and using DGPulldown?

[zambelli]

I guess I'll have to answer my own question. I found this to be a better conversion script:

LeakKernelBob(order=1, sharp=true) # assuming TFF
LanczosResize(720, 480)
ChangeFPS(59.94)
SeparateFields()
SelectEvery(4, 1, 2)
Weave()

You'll need the LeakKernel bob/deinterlacer plugin for it.

[MOmonster]

@zambelli
Sorry my mistake. Wrong answer. It is just to late. Your solution is really ok. You could use other filters than changefps, but it could result in blend or something like this. So keep your solution if it works good for you.

[zambelli]

@zambelli
Sorry my mistake. Wrong answer. It is just to late. Your solution is really ok. You could use other filters than changefps, but it could result in blend or something like this. So keep your solution if it works good for you.

Yeah, I decided to go with ChangeFPS primarily because I didn't want to introduce any unnecessary ghosting. I'm actually very impressed with the end result - it might be the best PAL2NTSC conversion I've ever seen. :) All the BBC America shows look extremely fuzzy compared to this conversion.