Thanks John. I did search for what you said but only found my post and some post about you converting 8mm to 29.97

Anyway, I have no plans on feeding it directly to MPEG. I want to recreate the DV file but 24p. I am assuming since I can use AviSynth with VirtualDUB that it will do this. Simply put, I want the incredible, non interlaced look of these videos back to their original form. If this AviSynth script could do that, that would be incredible...

Also, if it helps, here is a small clip of the music video fresh in it's DV format:

http://www.stickyfingaz.com/clip.avi

I tried using Magic Bullet with after effects but apparantly that's supposed to be for people who didn't even shoot in 24p in the first place, so it looked really jittery in some scenes. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get this back to 24p to make it look like great film again.

Which 24p mode was it shot in? What camera? ('m assuming the DVX100 or DVX100z?)
Why are you not simply putting it in a 23.976 timeline and editing/rendering there? All you should need to do is be sure that "Allow Pulldown Removal" is enabled in your Options

No no no no no. This music video is over 10 years old, and I wasn't involved in the shoot at all. It was shot on film film, nothing digital. Film is then kept on a master format, I am guessing for that time it was BetaCam SP or something. It was then dubbed to me on MiniDV.

You may not be able to get it back, depending on how the pulldown was inserted. Simply placing this media in a 24p timeline w/o removing pulldown should manage the media just fine.
What you have there ( I guess you realize this) is media that has already had pulldown inserted, but who knows how it was accomplished?

"Simply placing this media in a 24p timeline w/o removing pulldown should manage the media just fine."

What do you mean? In Vegas just render it with the 24p option?

I'm no expert on film to video, but have had many 35mm spots handed to me on Beta SP , and they looked like film , no need to pull down pull out pull up whatever, its 30 frames but you KNOW its shot on film and looks great.
Maybe missing something, but dont understand why you want it 24.

My last answer to your question was early in the morning, and must have resulted from brainfreeze. What you want to do is called "inverse telecine," not pulldown. Inverse Telecine removes pulldown.

If you know how to use AVISynth, here is a script that will do what you want, and you will be able to recover the original frames from your DV AVI file, even if the pulldown is complicated (which it often is, because the pulldown cadence is often started anew at each scene change).

# Script to IVTC a movie.

# Note: must serve into VD and then direct stream serve into MC

# For this script, serve out of Vegas using YUYV



#-----------------------------

#Telecide and Decimate are part of the Decomb plugin



loadPlugin("c:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\Decomb\Decomb521.dll")



AVISource("D:\frameserver.avi")



#Telecide(order=0)  # this is slower because it does post processing, and doesn't assume 3:2

# The following is the normal telecide routine

Telecide(show=false,order=0,guide=1,post=2,vthresh=60)

Decimate(cycle=5) 



AssumeFPS(23.976, true)



#Next two lines not always needed; depends on your encoder

ConvertToRGB32(interlaced=false)          #Needed to get correct color when serving into MC.

Levels(16, 1, 235, 0, 255, coring=false)

I agree about why change it back to 24. When it is viewed on a TV, pulldown will be added back by the DVD player. You cannot watch a 24 fps video on a normal NTSC TV. It has to be 29.97.

Dave T2

... why change it back to 24 ...

If you are going to encode to MPEG-2, you should ALWAYS do the inverse telecine and change back to 24 fps progressie. The MPEG-2 encode is unbelievably better than if you leave the pulldown in place. This is not a subtle difference -- it is absolutely night and day.

johnmeyer, you are a god! It worked perfectly. I couldn't believe it. I owe you a beer.

Quick question though, the output video is "longer" than the original DV tape in terms of aspect ratio. I hope I am not confusing. Like the music video off the DV tape is a perfect square in shape. Once I push it through your filter, the output video is noticeably longer wide wise. Not by much, but it is noticeable. Because of this (I believe) I noticed when the video fades in, and then out at the end, there are faint horizontal lines that appear. Again that does not show during the video.

if you could help me fix that, then well, I don't know what to say :)

You should read the Decomb guide to make sure the settings I have will work for you.

order: Has to be set to correspond to how your capture card captures fields. For DV, order=0 (bottom field first)

guide: Set this to 1 if you are trying to recover from an NTSC 24 fps film source

post: This enbales deinterlacing on frames where the original frame couldn't be recovered. This works in conjunction with the vthresh parameter.

My recommendation would be to try a few minutes of sample video with both the post and vthresh parameters removed.

Any aspect distortion is probably not from the filter chain, but instead caused by something you are doing either in your encoder or in how the video is being served into AVISynth. You might want to try commenting out the filter and see if the distortion is still there -- my guess is that it will be. You'll have to troubleshoot that yourself, I think.

johnmeyer, I figured out the problem. I had been using Full Process Mode in VirtualDUB. I needed to choose another DV format to recompress to. It was converting to a non compressed format!

Anyway, my final "problem" is converting it to DVD. DVD Architect 3 gives me the option of 24p or 29fps. Which do I choose when putting this file in DVDA3 and putting it on DVD?

I have a program called Canopus Pro Coder 2, a very expensive mpeg2 coding program. The program asks if when going to DVD do I want it to be 24p or 29fps. However if I choose 24p, the program crashes. 29fps it works fine. I tried rendering it at 29fps and put it on my DVD that way and it looked fine.

I think after you fill me in on this I will be enlightened to my fullest extent :)

You want to encode with the "pulldown flag" enabled.