Hybrid film clips

Hi there, I'm trying to encode Carl Sagan's Cosmos DVD's and running into a bit of trouble. It's hybrid material, usually about 60-70% NTSC, 30-40% FILM. Obviously, there are problems with leaving it at 29.97fps, and forcing it to 23.976fps. I think leaving it at 29.97fps is the best solution, but which parameters to use -- that's another one altogether. I'm familiar with one solution: Telecide() <aside, should I use guide=1 here?, in a hybrid clip too?> Decimate(mode=1) The problem with this is that it spits out a lot of duplicate frames, resulting in jerky panning scenes. Decimate(mode=1) tries to fix that by making it an interpolation of its surrounding frames, so that fluidity of movement is preserved. In practice though it doesn't seem to improve things to a tolerable level, so I'm craving another way to go about things. In doing so I just thought to myself, what if we don't create duplicate frames to begin with? What if we just use FieldDeinterlace() and leave out Telecide() and Decimate()? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this. This is my guess, I may very well be wrong: 1) Movement fluidity is preserved as it was in original source. 2) Image quality reduced, however, because the original 24fps material isn't recovered to independent frames, so we get some blurriness. Give the choice, I'd rather live with 2) than 1). Please let me know if I'm right, or wrong, or whatever, or if you might have either a solution for me, or just bad news that.

Certainly just deinterlacing the whole thing is a viable option and may give smoother results, provided you use blend deinterlacing. But then instead of having 1 in 5 blended frames, you'll have 2 in 5 (for the 3:2 pulldown portions). Choose your lesser evil based on your personal aesthetic tastes.

I had the same problems while trying to encode some TV shows such as Star Trek The Next Generation. The method we finally figured out that works is to use TmpgEnc and set the Encode Mode type under the video tab to "Inverse 3:2 pulldown" and set the framerate to 29.97fps. It makes it all smooth. NTSC, Film, etc. I didnt notice any jerkiness after encoding about 5 episodes. Hope this helps.. Mgd72