"Ghosting" in PAL Rips

[Raggedstar]

Well now, about a decade on a-m-v.org, nearly 8 years making and uploading AMVs, and I make my first post now? I guess better time as any.

So, encoding and capturing aren't my strengths. I've read through many forums and guides (including ones on this site) and ultimately can't find a solution that makes things ANY better for my DVD rips. I want to eliminate the chance that I'm just a stupid person fiddling with things I don't understand and instead reach out to people who may know what they're talking about and work things out more personally.

I imported Ginga Densetsu Weed (no laughing, please) DVDs from Denmark. To the furthest of my understanding, these are legitimate DVDs (I have a friend who also received the same DVDs from a friend in Denmark). When I rip them, I get a "ghosted" frames in movement. This is unrelated to the file type or codec and will even show up if you go frame-by-frame in any ripper or Virtualdub. All settings consider the different frame rate cross-region. No de-interlacing option within Sony Vegas 11 or the smart de-interlacing filter in Virtualdubmod will make any improvement. I have downloaded AMVapp and therefore have Virtualdubmod, AVIsynth, and the lot and have experimented with various scripts I've scraped up from guides and forum posts (whether or not used "properly" is up in the air).

Here is a 1 minute clip straight from the ripper

Sample Picture (from 0:33, a good example where the character on the left is turning his head)

While I know the general rule of thumb is that you're out of luck with PAL DVDs (I live in Canada, so this only became a problem now) I do want to know if there's anything decent I can salvage for editing. As far as I know, the series and franchise doesn't have any NTSC DVD releases outside Japan, and the Japanese DVDs are pretty rare and expensive. $300+ sometimes for the entire 26 episode series if you can find it, as it might be out of print (for obvious reasons if you know the show) and certain episodes in 2 ep DVDs are available on Amazon.com for $15-$30 each. The franchise since the 80s has had a following in Northern Europe, hence the Danish DVDs.

So if anyone can help me out, that would be great. I understand this may be a common problem inherited by the region that may not be fixable, but it's worth getting an opinion before I give up entirely.

Thanks

[l33tmeatwad]

To be able to accurately help you we will need to see the information from DGIndex and the AviSynth script you are using to rip them.

[Raggedstar]

What information from DGIndex do you need? I did find this when looking at the untouched VOB file:

Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Frame Size: 720 x 576
Profile: Main@main
Frame Rate: 25
Video Type: PAL
Frame Type: Interlaced
Frame Struct: Frame
Field Order: Top

As for AVIsynth I haven't created any videos with scripts, only looking through Virtualdubmod's output preview. The video in the link has nothing done to it outside of a typical rip (might be Xvid codec). I can create one if you like as an example.

[l33tmeatwad]

Considering that video is 1024x768 @ 29.969fps there are some alternations done. You can follow this guide to see how to handle writing an AviSynth script, however since your DVD is PAL you will need to change "tdecimate()" to "tdecimate(cycle=25)" in your script to avoid causing the framerate to be irregular. Repost if you are still seeing the issue after trying this method. I also recommend using the latest VirtualDub instead of a mod version.

[Raggedstar]

Huh, I must've uploaded one of my experimental rips. Sorry about that.

Anyways, thanks for the link. I was obviously missing something. Followed that guide, and got a test video.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/brwr5b

Script:
MPEG2Source("C:\D_[DVDVolume]\VTS_01_1.d2v")
tdecimate(cycle=25)

(no filters, Xvid compression)

No audio, but not a huge concern. I also got an updated DGIndex and some information is now slightly different. I'll repost in case it changes things.

Aspect Ratio: 4:3 [2]
Frame Size: 720 x 576
Profile: Main@main
Frame Rate: 25
Video Type: PAL
Sequence: Field/Frame
Frame Type: Interlaced
Frame Struct: Frame
Field Order: Top

[l33tmeatwad]

Huh, I must've uploaded one of my experimental rips. Sorry about that.

Anyways, thanks for the link. I was obviously missing something. Followed that guide, and got a test video.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/brwr5b

Script:
MPEG2Source("C:\D_[DVDVolume]\VTS_01_1.d2v")
tdecimate(cycle=25)

(no filters, Xvid compression)

No audio, but not a huge concern. I also got an updated DGIndex and some information is now slightly different. I'll repost in case it changes things.

Aspect Ratio: 4:3 [2]
Frame Size: 720 x 576
Profile: Main@main
Frame Rate: 25
Video Type: PAL
Sequence: Field/Frame
Frame Type: Interlaced
Frame Struct: Frame
Field Order: Top

You left out interlace removal...should be:

Code: Select all

Script:
MPEG2Source("C:\D_[DVDVolume]\VTS_01_1.d2v")
tfm()
tdecimate(cycle=25)

After looking at that AVI, that should fix your issues.

[Raggedstar]

Aye, the interlacing is better with that script. No banding. Though there's still some problems with the "ghost" frames during movement (like in the image in my original post). Are those able to be fixed?

[l33tmeatwad]

First off, that is NOT called ghosting, it's field blending. Second, you are causing that to happen when you blend the fields together (like when you use a "deinterlacing" filter which basically just blends the fields together). Simply run the script I provided, it should remove the interlacing and decimate the frames down to what it needs to be. If you still have interlaced frames slipping through try decreasing the cthresh on tfm (ex. tfm(cthresh=5) or lower, this may cause combing noise so be careful).

[Raggedstar]

I apologize for the mix-up. At least I have a name for this issue now (which helps a lot, now that I think about it).

Tried that and experimented with different values, but didn't get any noticeable improvement.

I also re-tried this script on the entry of field blending in the "Making your footage Progressive" guide for a lark (for some reason it didn't help before) and got some surprising progress. It isn't perfect, but I don't know if I could ever get "perfect" with these DVDs. There's a tad decrease of quality in areas, but the movement is better and the blending is less obvious. For good measure I also tossed it into Vegas (my main editing program) and it looked decent. Huh... so yay?

Script on that page was:

TDeint(mode=1)
Srestore()

(I can provide an upload if you like)

[l33tmeatwad]

No need, as long as you got it working that's fine. PAL is a bit more tricky, I really need to get some PAL DVDs to work on testing with so I can be better help to those users with PAL footage.