Inverse Telecine Help

Back to film (standard)
Back to PAL
HD MPEG film (NTSC 3:2) to AppleTV

Back to film (standard)

Input is a movie in NTSC format (29.97 or 59.94 f/sec) that was obtained from 24p film by means of the telecine procedure.
You can recognize these movie as follows: a 29.97 fps movie has interlace in 2 frames, alternating with 3 frames without interlace. A 59.94 fps movie has a pattern of two identical frames alternating with 3 identical frames.
The redundant fields are removed and the result is 24p film.

Detect cadence breaks

Check this if your movie has been edited and may consist of parts with different phase. A first pass will be made over the movie that finds the cadence breaks.
If you don't check this option the cadence is found from the start of the movie, which may fail if it starts with a few seconds of black or a still picture.

Make reference movies

At each cadence break a new reference movie starts. This helps you find the original clips that make up the movie. However, some may not be found because they happen to have the same phase as the preceding clip.

Suppress interlaced scene changes

If a scene change happens in two interlaced input frames an ugly interlaced frame results in the output.
"factor" (default = 10.0) determines how a scene change is detected. To avoid unnecessary frame duplicates, set it as high as you can while checking that the real interlaced scene changes are still found.

Don't reinterlace chroma in interlaced frames

Sometimes the "reinterlace chroma" option in the input pane must not be applied to the interlaced frames (two out of five input frames).
Check this box if one in four frames of the output doesn't benefit from the reinterlace chroma procedure.

Back to PAL

Input is a movie in NTSC format (480x720, 29.97 f/sec) that was obtained from PAL material by means of the telecine procedure (adding one field after every 5 fields).
The redundant fields are removed and the result is again PAL (a lot softer though after being scaled twice).

Initial phase

A value between 1 and 6. The first field that must be removed.
Deinterlacing the start of the movie (both fields) may help you find the number. Else you may need to try all values on a short piece of the movie (including the start).
If you want to examine another part of the movie (containing a fast moving object) be sure to cut off a multiple of 3 frames and take into account that the phase jumps every 16 seconds.

First phase jump

48 seconds of PAL produce 2400 x 6/5 fields = 3000 fields but only 2997 are needed. So every 16 seconds a field must be dropped.
Enter the time the first field was dropped. First find the correct initial phase, then find the point where the output becomes jerky.
Again, deinterlacing the result may help.

HD MPEG film (NTSC format) to AppleTV

You can convert HD MPEG2 film footage recorded from TV to 720p h.264 suitable for AppleTV but the procedure is a little tedious.
1. Use MPEG Streamclip (free) to demux to m2v + AIFF (set the same name for audio and video).

2. For long movies it helps to create a reference movie to the m2v + AIFF files first using QuickTime Player Pro.
If QT Player cannot open the file you need to save to a QT format in step 1. For 1080i use M-JPEG, for 720p60 use Photo-JPEG. For short movies you can use uncompressed 2vuy (large file size!).

3. Do inverse telecine exporting to AppleTV.
Now you have a 720p24 h.264 file that can be watched with AppleTV.