Help for difficult source with fieldblending and strange ghosting

[paperish]

Hi, I am relatively new here but I've been learning AviSynth for a while, lurking here and learning everything I can. I have a very difficult anime source that's a little over my head and I wanted to see if anyone could give some pointers.

The source is an anime on a PAL DVD that was converted from 23.97p->telecined 29.97->59.94->fieldblended to 50->25fps. It really seems like whoever did the PAL conversion just ran it though some converter without caring about what came out. As if that wasn't enough, it also has some strange inter-frame ghosting artifacts that I haven't been able to find examples of anywhere on the forums.

I have gotten decent results getting rid of the blends and restoring the original framerate using TDeint followed by SRestore but I would like some advice on how to clean up the artifacts from the blend removal and the ghosting I mentioned. First the ghosting: there are sometimes remains of high-contrast horizontal edges (generally linework) from the previous or next fields. It happens in most but not all scenes, and within scenes it happens in most but not all fields, seemingly randomly. Sometimes one field will have a ghost from the previous field and the next field at the same time (double ghost) but importantly, the ghosts never occur when there is any fieldblending. I haven't been able to find any pattern to the ghosting. Here's an example of two adjacent bobbed fields:



Any idea what these artifacts are called and how to remove them? If needed I can provide a short example from the DVD if someone can tell me the best way to share it.

Finally, I'd like some advice on how to clean up the output of SRestore. It's good at getting the original framerate back but the frames it outputs vary in quality a lot. Sometimes it outputs a frame that was originally a blend of a frame's top&bottom fields so the output is nice and crisp, but other times apparently the cleanest frame is an obviously bobbed one, kinda blurry with jagged edges on the lines. Plus the static edges in most scenes have a slight 'wobble' to them that denoising doesn't seem to fix. It helps a little in mostly static scenes if I use Dup1() to replace duplicates with the best one but it doesn't work for motion, so I'd like a better solution. Example of two adjacent frames of the output:



Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've spent the last week trying to roll my own field blend restorer cause I initially thought that SRestore wasn't going to work for me, so you could say I'm dedicated to restoring this stupid cartoon... 😏