Having some challenging fun working on trying to deinterlace some toughie clips
from my brother’s upcoming feature film.
His camera recorded in 24fps (24000/1001 to you fellow geeks 
and smartly
did a “2323″ writing/stretching of it to 60i (60 half-frames).
After correcting back to 24fps progressive most of his clips, he’s found ~10-20%
are not able to be put back together visually properly even with CineTools
and manually specifying the “cadence” and sequence starting frames, etc…
I started with code that I wrote to take a small segment of a video
and split the interlaced frames into 1/2 height “fields” and then drop them
down to grayscale to compare them all to each other to find the best matches
(to verify the cadence is right and/or the fields aren’t “off by 1″, etc..)
It uses mplayer and ImageMagick (“convert” and “compare”) for pretty high-quality
extraction of frames from the source video into the 1/2 height “fields”.
So I just do about 0.3 seconds to get 10 frames, and thus 20 1/2 frame fields for analyzing.
It will output the best matches of frames. For example:
php lacer.php good.mov 0.5 0.8
I then extended it into a web page (screenshot above, where I’m left-shifting one field by 4 pixels for visual inspection)
PHP script <== try it out online! (source)
that uses some CSS cleverness (clip property is your BFF!) to interlace together a pair of fields.
It supports:
- field swapping (move one 1/2 image to be the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. lines — if it was
previously the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc. lines) - left and right shifting a field
- pairing arbitrary fields
- showing a “raw” 60i telecined sequence
- showing the 60i sequence as a “deinterlaced” 24P sequence
