Hi all. I'm having some trouble inverse telecining one of my video captures, and I'd like to see if I can pick your collective brains for help.

The material is the 70s live-action Spider-Man series that I taped back in the 80s, and now I'm transferring it to VCD for archival before the tapes die on me. I'm pretty sure the show was shot on film because a) I can tell by the look of it, b) I know that some episodes were released theatrically overseas, and c) when I look at it frame-by-frame in VDub I can see a pattern of progressive and interlaced frames that suggests telecining, but it's not the familiar 3:2 pattern. It appears somewhat random.

I have tried both TMPEGEnc 12a and decomb, and neither is able to perform a satisfactory IVTC. It looks fine on a monitor, but on a TV the motion looks jerky and unnatural. And I know it isn't my player, because I have successfully IVTC'ed other similar material in exactly the same way before. It's just this particular matierial.

The only thing I can figure is that the lower quality of the material is preventing the algorithms from correctly detecting the interlaced frames and they are throwing out the wrong ones. The shows were recorded at 6 hour speed nearly 20 years ago, and although they are very good for what they are, in the grand scheme of things they are rather poor as sources go. Most of my material in the past has been DirecTV-sourced SP tapes.

I've played with decomb's threshold paramaters, but without success. Does anybody have any suggestions? TIA.

Hi segfault,

Did you try:

on your .avs script

-kwag

Hi Kwag. Yes, I tried that and it has always worked for me in the past. I have also tried these variations to improve the combing detection:

Telecide(reverse=true)
Telecide(guide=1)
Telecide(threshold=x)
Telecide(chroma=true)
Decimate(cycle=5) (which should function the same as Decimate(5))

None of these options have helped so far.

If I were you I'd ask in Doom9's Avisynth forum where the author of Decomb, Donald Graft, hangs out. He's often willing to help out with difficult material.

Yep, get ready to make a HuffYUV sample for him, Don seems to like a good challenge

Will do! Thanks very much, guys.