3:2 Pulldown Issue

Video AI General
1

Hello fellow Topaz’ers

Background/Preamble:
I have a movie produced (by us) some 20 years ago. It was shot on 35mm film at 24fps. All of the 35mm reels were telecined to Digital Beta with 3:2 pulldown. The film was then edited in a video based NLE and mastered to video at 29.97fps.

I’m trying to bump-up the movie from SD to 4K. My first pass is using Dione V2 (V3 makes a mess of it, none of the other models can fix the interlacing) at 100% Denoise. Jumping straight to 4K from 3:2 interlaced SD results in a bigger mess than its worth. Two passes … looks amazing. Except …

Problem
Topaz introduces a visible and painfully noticeable alternating White and Black glow around objects in motion on the two interlaced frames. When played at normal speed, it looks like a weird pulsing flicker that didn’t exist previously.

Unfortunately, as helpful as they were Topaz tech support said they had not heard of 3:2 pulldown and as such were unable to help. That tells me I’m getting too old!

Help?
Has anyone else encountered the 3:2 pulldown problem? If you did, how did you solve it?

Work Around
At this point, I can only see one work-around. I have to convert the 29.97fps 3:2 interlaced movie back to 24fps progressive in an NLE first. This involves disassembling the edits (I don’t have the original project files any more), apply a reverse telecine to each individual edit. Reassemble the edits to produce a 24fps version. After which I can run it through Topaz to bump up to 4k. Just seems like an awful lot of work with a high margin for error.

Thanks in advance

2

I’ve had good results using AviSynth scripts (.avs files) which you can drag and drop right into Topaz VEAI. This way you don’t have to render a 24p version first. AviSynth can be a bit scary since it looks like you’re programming, but there’s a ton of good videos and tutorials out there. This one in particular is about doing an inverse telecine, which is what you want to do.

Oh and if you’re on a Mac and can’t do AviSynth, then you can use a video compressor like Handbrake to do an inverse telecine. That would require the extra rendering step, of course.

2 Likes
3

Have you tried Chronos model to pull down to 23.976?

4

Not sure if this will help, but I’m remastering The Twilight Zone 80s and 2003 DVDs.
With Handbrake, 2003 DVDs I set the frames “same as source”, and enable Detelecine. It successfully converted the video to 23.976fps. It doesn’t work with all videos, I think it only works for videos with true telecine. Then I export it to H.265 10-bit CRF0 ultrafast tune=grain for further processing with other software.

5

I’ve had issues getting it to work with most videos, lol. Fortunately there is another way;

Set the (Handbrake) output FPS to 23.976 and turn Detelecine off, somehow Handbrake figures out what needs to be done.

This has been so reliable, I’ve stopped using the Detelecine option all together.

6

You can? :astonished:

I wish I’d known this a while back, I have tons of these from my Virtualdub days.