[MEncoder-users] Best way to performance an inverse telecine

[Eric Wescott]

I have quite a bit of HDV footage I recorded with an Canon HV30 camera 
using it's 24P setting. Canon offers optional 24p support on their HDV 
consumer camcorders: this mode officially is called “PF24″. 
Unfortunately, PF24 doesn’t record on the tape a “pure” 24 frame 
progressive stream but instead it records 18 progressive frames and 12 
interlaced ones — inside a 60i stream. Even worse, Canon does not 
include “flags” in that video stream to guide applications as to how to 
extract the 24 progressive frames out of this 60i stream.

So, I need to perform an inverse telecine in order to get 24 progressive 
frames. I've followed the guide at 
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/07/13/canon-hv20-24p-pulldown/
for the -vf pullup, softskip and huffyuv codec which I eventually 
transcode to ProRes 422.

However, I noticed there are several inverse telecine filters in 
mplayer. I've found the following methods at 
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-149298.html

1. -vf decimate=2:1000:1600:.001 -ofps 24000/1001
2. -vf framestep=2,filmdint=dint_thres=256,harddup -ofps 24000/1001
3. -vf pullup,softskip
4. -vf filmdint

I don't quite understand all the additional arguments for the filters 
and which ones I should use..

My question is this. Is one method better than another in terms of the 
final output quality? I don't care about how the filters degrade 
encoding speed I just want the best possible quality.

Thanks
Eric Wescott