How to recover progressive frames from this opening space shot from Star Trek Voyager

[Mawazi]

I'm a long-suffering Star Trek fan, doomed to DVD encoding oddities. Currently, I'm working through Star Trek Voyager. I'm ripping, IVTCing to mkv vfr, encoding to HEVC. Things are going swimmingly.

Then I encounter this at the beginning of the episode entitled, "Heroes and Demons," from season 1.

It is the opening shot of the USS Voyager gliding past the camera into the distance. However, it is combed, and the pattern doesn't make any sense to me. I have separated fields, it's still combed in the individual fields.

I'm guessing that this is simply a completely screwed up transfer to DVD that is probably unrecoverable by any sane means. So, I present to you the following sample.

Anyone have an idea?

sample.vob

Update: Barring a wizardly method of recovering the frames, I have simply selected the two good frames out of each 5 frames using selectevery(5,1,2). Of course, that now leaves me with a ~ 12fps, jumpy sequence. I can just keep one of them, giving me a ~ 6fps sequence, which is a nice divisor of 30fps. Is there any way to interpolate frames in this situation to get back up to 30fps? I fear not, especially at the beginning of the sequence where the ship is moving quite a bit between frames. So, I'm left with either keeping the original combed frames, or removing the combed frames but creating a very low fps sequence.

[Buck746]

If you send me the decimated sequence I could try using a filter in after effects to generate new frames.

[Mawazi]

Originally Posted by Buck746

If you send me the decimated sequence I could try using a filter in after effects to generate new frames.

Thank you for the kind offer! I believe I've arrived at a solution. I have used selectevery to select just the good frames (after NNEDI3ing it first, which left me with 3 good frames out of every 10). Then I use framerateconverter to bump the fps up to 30000/1001. Nice and smooth. Now I just need to merge that opening sequence with the rest of the video and I'll be good.

Avisynth and its plug-ins are really something, there's always a solution waiting to be discovered! :-)

[Gser]

Have you tried srestore http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Srestore? And btw did you figure out a way to get rid of the rainbowing? I see it even on the netflix version.

[Mawazi]

Originally Posted by Gser

Have you tried srestore http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Srestore? And btw did you figure out a way to get rid of the rainbowing? I see it even on the netflix version.

No, haven't even attempted anything else. All of the streaming versions are pretty awful, no thought or effort seems to have been put into them.

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[hello_hello]

Not Perfect, but a reasonable improvement. You'd probably need to create intermediate files and do it in several passes. If I try to run all this together, apart from the complaints about cached frames, Avisynth tends to sit there spinning it's wheels.

QTGMC()
Srestore(23.976, thresh=44, speed=1, cache=10)
Srestore(11.94, thresh=44, speed=1, cache=10) # I probably should have used 11.988 but it seems I'm mathematically challenged.
FrameRateConverter(24000,1001, preset="slower")

sampled.mkv

Have you found the magic setting that lets x265 keep the same amount of detail as x264, or does it still look like it has a built-in noise filter blurring out detail when encoding standard definition?

[Mawazi]

Originally Posted by hello_hello

Not Perfect, but a reasonable improvement. You'd probably need to create intermediate files and do it in several passes. If I try to run all this together, apart from the complaints about cached frames, Avisynth tends to sit there spinning it's wheels.

QTGMC()
Srestore(23.976, thresh=44, speed=1, cache=10)
Srestore(11.94, thresh=44, speed=1, cache=10) # I probably should have used 11.988 but it seems I'm mathematically challenged.
FrameRateConverter(24000,1001, preset="slower")

sampled.mkv

Have you found the magic setting that lets x265 keep the same amount of detail as x264, or does it still look like it has a built-in noise filter blurring out detail when encoding standard definition?

Thanks for giving it a shot! I discovered in the same episode that they screwed up the beginning of the opening credits. I think someone was drunk while preparing this episode for the DVD.

I used my selectevery() and framerateconverter() sequence and achieved a fine version of that first space shot, except for the first few frames, which are distorted. So, I trimmed them out and recreated the fade-in from black to match up with the first good frame. I replaced the opening credits with a correct version from a different episode.

As far as x265 goes, I found some settings on this forum that seem to work well when encoding to 10-bits, though I haven't done much in the way of pixel-peeking. I end up with a file about 1/4 the size of the original vob and it subjectively looks fine to me, watched it on my laptop screen and on a 50" TV.

[Mawazi]

Originally Posted by Gser

Have you tried srestore http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Srestore? And btw did you figure out a way to get rid of the rainbowing? I see it even on the netflix version.

Of course, after you mentioned the rainbowing issue I started noticing it. I've added the chubbyrain2 function to my script and it seems to be doing an excellent job of removing the rainbows. I'm also using tcomb to help with just the dot-crawl, which was particularly noticeable on text.

I'm guessing I now have one of the nicer versions of this particular episode that exists in the world. ;-)

[Gser]

Originally Posted by Mawazi

Of course, after you mentioned the rainbowing issue I started noticing it. I've added the chubbyrain2 function to my script and it seems to be doing an excellent job of removing the rainbows. I'm also using tcomb to help with just the dot-crawl, which was particularly noticeable on text.

I'm guessing I now have one of the nicer versions of this particular episode that exists in the world. ;-)

There is also YARK which is based on chubby rain http://avisynth.nl/index.php/YARK

[Mawazi]

Originally Posted by Gser

There is also YARK which is based on chubby rain http://avisynth.nl/index.php/YARK

Indeed! I had switched over to Yark yesterday evening. Its default settings do a nice job, with fewer artifacts (that I could see) compared with chubbyrain2 on its own.

Thanks!

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