[MEncoder-users] pullup useless?

[Daniel Gnoutcheff]

Hello all,

OK, I'm working on making a DVD backup of a VHS tape of an old animated
movie. I've already done the capture, stored in a huge .avi, video
compressed with the lossless ffvhuff with the hope of making the thing
fit on my HD without losing any information.

I'm in NTSC country, and the movie is obviously telecined via 2:3
pulldown. I want to do an inverse pulldown on it.

Now, the detc filter works - but not perfectly. It seems to miss things
when there is only a little bit of isolated movement. So I'd like to use
one of the reputedly better pulldown and filmdint.

But there's a slight problem. pulldown does nothing. At all. mencoder
runs, but the video comes out unchanged and still telecined.

Now, I might put this down to noise - the VHS is crappy, the VCR is
crappy, and the TV capture card is crappy - but there are some scenes in
the source video (e.g. during pans) where the telecining is *really*
obvious. But to my horror, pullup doesn't get a clue.

I've tried adjusting pullup's parameters to help - I made it ignore some
junk on the top and bottom, and I adjusted the sc paramiter. My latest
attempt:

mencoder sw7d-telcine.avi -vf pullup=2:2:4:4:-1:0,softskip -oac copy
-ovc copy -o test.avi

sw7d-telcine.avi is a sort clip extracted from the big capture that
shows a pan, with very obvious telecine. I understand that this command
has pullup ignore 16 pixels on the left, 16 on the right, 8 on the top,
and 8 on the bottom.

The resulting test.avi is indistinguishable from sw7d-telcine.avi,
telecine and all.

Any ideas? How should I make pullup deal with noise? How to I give this
thing a clue, especially given the detc handles the same clip
beautifully?

Thanks all,
Daniel