The peculiar interlacing of Excel Saga

koronoru · Post by **koronoru** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 8:03 pm

I'm trying to rip the North American Excel Saga DVDs. My usual practice, when ripping NTSC DVDs, is to do an inverse telecine so that my ripped files are 23.976fps progressive, and edit from there. Even though I lose some quality to recompression when I do that, it's worth it to not have to worry about interlacing while I edit, and I think doing the IVTC on the original footage (instead of after editing, or not at all) allows it to be a better IVTC.
The trouble is that with these discs, I don't know what format they are in but it ain't traditional 3:2 telecine. Most frames don't show interlacing at all. There are some sequences where the picture changes with every frame (at 29.970) but the two fields for each frame match. There are some sequences where the picture appears to change with every field, like real television (don't let's get into that fight again...); it seems to have been actually animated at 59.94. There are some sequences, when I view it field by field, where it looks like the fields were stored in the wrong order - an object that's supposed to be moving smoothly will jump forward and back. But I've tried changing the order of the fields from top first to bottom first and that makes things worse, so I don't think it's just that they were put onto the DVD backwards. Some sequences are close enough to 3:2 to fool mplayer temporarily; it switches randomly between television and IVTC modes while playing.
Does anyone here have any experience with this particular footage? What *is* it? Is there any hope of forcing it back into some semblance of progressive?
I'm thinking I may be best off to just leave it as 29.970 interlaced, do a pure lossless rip instead of processing it, and then do any de-interlacing afterwards.

ErMaC · Post by **ErMaC** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 9:15 pm

Excel Saga was a digital show, and many scenes were animated at 29.97fps, and some pans and other things done at 59.94 fields. You can't IVTC it without losing information.

SS5_Majin_Bebi · Post by **SS5_Majin_Bebi** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 10:15 pm

Thats why I'm happy. All my DVD's (not including DBGT 2, 3 and 4 and BBZ Movie 8; I picked up the American ones for helping out at SupaNova) are in 25fps PAL so all I gotta do is deinterlace. But yes, Ermac is spot on. Excel Saga is a digital anime; they even pay that fact out in one episode. This subject actually gets a mention in the Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides</a>, too. Something about seeing a pan done in 59.94 and going "woah.....that was smooth".

koronoru · Post by **koronoru** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 9:33 am

Oh, good. So I'm not hallucinating and don't need to stop smoking this crack yet.

SS5_Majin_Bebi · Post by **SS5_Majin_Bebi** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 8:06 pm

koronoru wrote:Oh, good. So I'm not hallucinating and don't need to stop smoking this crack yet.

No, you can keep smoking crack, my drug-dependant friend. I'm actually hanging out for the next time I can smoke or eat (preferably eat; havn't done that yet) some weed and forget about my life for a few hours.