Star Trek Strangeness

Star Trek TNG is hybrid. If you refer to the Decomb documentation about how to deal with hybrid material, you'll come across this: Processing Hybrid Clips Some clips mix film and nonfilm content. One way to handle these is to leave them at the original frame rate and let Decimate determine what to do with the frames that would otherwise have been dropped: LoadPlugin("decomb.dll") AVISource("hybrid.avi") Telecide() Decimate(mode=1,threshold=50) AFAIK you can't get TNG down to 23.976fps without getting chunky video on the pure NTSC scenes. I've been DivXing TNG episodes since season 1 came out on DVD and using that avisynth script. Perfect progressive output. Might be a 29.97fps output, but I don't see any way around that. Set it to simpleresize(480,352), video @ DivX 5 560kbps w/bframes and Vorbis audio @ 84kbps, chop off the intro and end credits and you'll get 4 episodes per 795 meg XCD at decent quality. WMV 9 will give you decent quality at the same bitrate at 640x480, but it's slow, and I'm waiting for a doom9 guide, and it might not be playable on MPEG-4 standalones.

Would pure NTSC portions exhibit 3:2 pull-down symptoms, such as 3 good frames, 2 combed, 3 good, 2 combed, etc.? Because that's the behavior I notice all throughout, even in ostensible "pure NTSC" portions. To me, that looks more like classic FILM -> Telecined -> 29.97fps after-effect.

I don't know. I'm not very good with deinterlacing and IVTC and the like, so I just rely on the standard scripts in guides and help files.

Understandable. All I'm saying is that it looks to me, now, like it is pure FILM, even the credits, but that the telecine job might have been done less than perfectly, because it keeps switching patterns all the time. Can anyone suggest a method whereby I can determine if a scene is truly native 29.97fps?

Well people have tried to encode the episodes at 23.976fps using IVTC (and groups have released their episodes as such), and they were jerky as hell during the space scenes, so it can't be pure FILM.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's not FILM content, it might mean that the telecine job was less than optimal, because, and I'll say it again, it seems to be 3:2 pull-down material, because you get 3 good frames, then 2 combed, in every 5-frame segment, which is EXACTLY what you get when you have FILM -> telecined. So if the IVTC can adjust its IVTC-ing to match new patterns, when a new one appears, it could very well achieve 23.976fps with smoothness, in theory. Of course, this is the theory of a non-videophile, so I need an expert to respond to this thread.

What makes you so sure of that: "This is because it was filmed but with special effects added after conversion to 30fps and pure video bits added in"

@JohnMK I'm not sure at all :) But how could I be when its been(or might have been) so manipulated :) Does a tree falling down in a far away forest make a sound when it hits the ground? The only thing I'm sure of is that Schroedinger's cat must have starved to death by now - so its definitely dead. ;) Did I mention the drink? regards Simon

Check out these intro-credits frames. They exhibit 3:2 pulldown symptoms. As do all special effects scenes. They're frames 7732-7735, capturing the motion of the Enterprise. The pattern is always 3 good, 2 combed. Btw, these are unprocessed by DVD2AVI. I did NOT Force FILM.

If parts of it have video source or overlays and you are going to be displaying it on a 60 hz display anyway then you might want to try Decomb without Decimate. It wont compress quite as well but will maybe be closer to the DVD quality, with some parts being telecined progressive and other parts being deinterlaced video, yielding a 30 hz clip. Or you can get a similar effect with: GreedyHMA(1,0,1,0,1,0,0,0) or GreedyHMA(0,0,1,0,1,0,0,0) depending upon whether the clip is coded TopFirst. - Tom