A somewhat off topic query, but I’m thinking others have run into this dilemma, and I hope the brain trust here has some ideas.
I’m working on a very large project of restoring hundreds of photos and capturing hours and hours of home family VHS and various flavors of camcorder tapes for our two extended families. TVAI does a great job of cleaning up these captures and producing nice 59.94 deinterlaced files of various resolution.
The problem that I’m facing is that some people prefer DVDs to mp4 files, as they either don’t have a smart TV, or prefer the convenience of a DVD “collection”. So, I need a way to use the progressive files on a regular NTSC DVD. I’d like to retain the nice deinterlaced quality. I’ve seen various ideas about how to reinterlace, but several involve After Effects which I don’t own, or using AVISync scripts, that I have no experience with. I did try using a script in a host application, but I couldn’t get it to run. Virtualdub has an “interlace” filter which worked somewhat, but with artifacts. Editing apps seem to create interlaced files by dropping every other frame, and creating two identical fields within the single 29.97 frame. This doesn’t make for nice smooth video. I suspect that a sophisticated motion estimation approach is what is necessary, but I’m hoping someone here has an idea. There might be an app or program that’s available to do this. If AVISync can do it, I’d love to know how, and I’ll spend some time trying to learn it, but I do have a time constraint on this project, and lots more photos and videos to digitize and restore.
DVDs can only store 30i (29.97 interlace) or 24p (23.976 progressive).
Therefore, if you want to save 60p (59.94 progressive), convert to 30i, but you have two choices: smoothness of motion or high resolution.
(1) Drop to 30fps and display the same frames in odd and even fields to ensure resolution.
(2) 60fps and display different frames in odd and even fields. Instead, the vertical resolution is halved.
However, for Blu-ray, 1280x720 60p is probably the best, since the following can be selected.
1920 x 1080,30i
1920 x 1080,24p
1440 x 1080,30i(anamorphic → 1920x1080)
1440 x 1080,24p(anamorphic → 1920x1080)
1280 x 720,60p
1280 x 720,24p
Blu-ray is definitely what I would do for me, but I might be dealing with folks who have a DVD player hooked to a TV with composite video
I’ve gone back and worked on tweaking what I had come up with using VirtualDub, and I’m encouraged.
The AVISynth script still won’t run in my MPEG encoder, and I’m unsure why. I’m digging deeper into that.
The obvious answer is that everyone that wants this content needs to update to more current technology, but this has become a challenge I’m determined to solve. Neat Video cures a lot of the noise, and works in the interlaced mode, but VAI does a superior job of de-noise and preservation and enhancing of details.
Which MPEG encoder and AVISynth script are you using ?
Something like…
AssumeTFF() # change to AssumeBFF() if the source is Bottom Field first
SeparateFields()
SelectEvery(4, 0, 3)
Weave()
Carlito, I admit to being a complete befuddled novice when it comes to AVISynth. I’ve been meaning to learn over the years, but never got around to it. I’ve tried several freeware front end GUIs for HCenc so far, and scripts I’ve read about similar to yours. I’m obviously completely out of my comfort zone right now. Hopefully I can devote some time to learning the basics this weekend. Maybe then, I can talk more intelligently about this.
