Strange Telecined Footage

[Meierhans]

I got my hands on an old Transformers DVD (...don?t kill me for that).
I "transformed" the Vobs with Womble Mpeg Video Wizard without any recompression into MPEG-2 Video Files, So I can open them in After Effects.

I though this may be normal telecined material (Its PAL! How the hell can it be telecined on PAL?), but AFX estimated a framerate of 20 (pretty strange) and can?t do a propper inverse-telecine on the footage.

Maybe this is because its painted and has no stable FPS?
Anybody knows a method or tool to get the fullframes back?

Deinterlacing is no option since it degrades quality alot.

[videobrian]

a normal animation rate for cartoons is 12fps or half normal film speed. animators shooting 2 frames for every drawing.

though the g.i. joe/transformers era stuff looked kind of crappy-slow a lot of the time no?
the cheap productions such as these i've heard to be 6 or 8 different drawings per second, but sometimes more or sometimes less depending on how much motion there needs to be shown in a shot.


but yeah, i'd guess it was 24fps to 29.97 telecini and then from 29.97 to PAL 25fps interlaced which gives some pretty weird combinations of fields over frames, everything looks fine at normal speed but... i've seen this sort of thing before with movies which were converted to pal from an ntsc video source rather than the film itself.
i gave an honest attempt to get back to progressive in some logical way but totally failed (sorry to say)

i think the best you could hope for at the moment is to use a high-quality motion adaptive field iterpoliation deinterlacer thingie (i think mpeg-streamclip uses some 2d-fir deinterlacer, whatever that is) pick a frame-rate close to what you figure the original may have been, 6 or 8fps i guess. at such a low rate there's probably going to be one solid frame per drawing in there somewhere.

[Meierhans]

This is some kind of interlaced Hell! :grrr:
Thx for suggestions.

:help:

[sleepytom]

transformers on dvd???

surly this is a copy of a VHS then? transformers was late 80's wasn't it? ie long before the advent of DVD, so even if its an official product the best you can hope for is a DVD from the original (err probably highband umatic)

anyway a decent deinterlace is what you want try this one http://neuron2.net/smart/smart.html - inverse telecine is never simple unless you know the precise details of how the film was originaly shot and transfered. it is possible to directly TK to PAL but there are a few diferent options which mean that reverseing the process to extract the whole frames is dificult / impossable.

assumeing what you have is a VHS transfer to PAL DVD the best option for better quality is going to be getting an original NTSC VHS from eBay! or maybe the NTSC DVD will have had a slightly more sane TK process?

[LEVLHED]

that all sounds rediculously complicated, wouldn't simply doing a live video capture be the easiest/most effective way?

(play the DVD and capture it from the deck)

[Meierhans]

Its not copied from VHS, its a mastered DVD with menu and all the original episodes from the beginning in very good quality.
Must be produced much later from original footage.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005LW1A/202-5628221-7945441

A friend found it used and made me a present.
Its just the DVD, no case or anything.
Normally I try to avoid Manga / Comic style since there are so many people doing this, but this is SO classic - and it was a present.

@LEVLHED I already have the footage in readable format, recapturing would help in no way to solve the interlacing issue.
But thx for your tip.

No tool I tried could find any pattern that matches this strange interlacing rythm. Its totally irregular, sometimes even parts of the picture are interlaced and parts are not - both moving! Drives me crazy!!

Looks like I will really need to deinterlace. What a pitty!!!!

[videobrian]

just get after effects to see it as 8fps under interpret footage...
and get it to guess the pull down for you.... it'll probably be wrong but it might work

it might work. if it doesn't, try 7.5 ... 6 ... 6.5 ... etc



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