Converting REALLY stepped on footage... Oh this is good

[Andrew J Morin]

Originally Posted by Tripp Woelfel

I'm with you on using AE but deinterlacing will cost me half the resolution. I'm not sure that's really worth doing. I know that AE will interpolate the missing lines but will that soften some already soft footage too much?


I tried all the remove pulldown options in the Interpret Footage function but none worked. Of course it was looking for a 24fps underlying source. What other options are there?


That sounds like a jigsaw puzzle to me but it would preserve the full resolution. How would that work?


Andrew, I appreciate the offer but the "dreaded client" doesn't want any footage let out before the final project is complete, so my hands are tied.

I'm a little lost on where you're going with this but intrigued to know how you're going to get there.

De-interlace isn't exactly what I have in mind, I'm not sure there is a proper technical term for it-- maybe field-separation...in AE it involves changing the composition settings. If you just drag the footage onto the "create comp" icon (aka the "little square"), the comp's settings will match what AE thinks the footage is. That is fine, generally, so let's say you've done that. The comp it created is set to 29.97fps: double this to 59.94 in the comp settings dialog. If the footage interpretation is set properly (i.e. not to "None") you'll have both video fields displayed on sequential frames and double the framerate. The "preserve edges" checkbox causes AE to interpolate the missing lines, if it's off then your scan-lines will just be doubled.

Next you'll be concerned about the pulldown: ignore the "footage interpretation" pulldown gizmos, since none of the defaults apply. Best case, there is a pattern to the field/frame repeats resulting from the above settings that you can use. e.g. By rendering at yet another frame rate, only taking every so-many frames; or by making nested comps with particular frame rates.

Jigsawing the multiples back together would be another interesting trick, more difficult if there's not a simple pattern to the way the 16 fps was upsampled. The benefit would come if there are actually several separate scans of each of the original frames-- as opposed to truly identical data repeated 2 or 3 times-- then you'd have a tiny bit more data from each image you could use to reconstruct the original. I suppose there might be some noise in the VHS/DVD data that could be smoothed out by overlaying (or otherwise combining) those multiplied frames, even if the raw frame-scans were identical originally.

[Tripp Woelfel]

Andrew... That's definitely worth a shot. I'll try that.