It’s the holiday season and that means watching some classic animated TV specials like The Grinch. I’ve captured several over the years and saved them to DVD’s the way they were broadcast (ie. interlaced) but I have an HD projector. I think the interlacing artifacts look awful on the projector and I’m picky about how the interlacing is dealt with.

So, I just did some testing to figure out what exactly is going on with deinterlacing with Xine, totem-xine and gmplayer on Ubuntu 8.10. I tested two animated specials which happened to be in the DVD drive — The Happy Elf, and Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas — but this applies to most animated TV shows.

A Little Background on Animation Broadcast via NTSC

In case you don’t know, most TV animation is produced in 24 frames per second then converted to 60 fields per second using a process called 2:3 pulldown or telecine.The best quality approach to this content is to recover the original 24 fps frames and send those to your projector (or monitor). This is called inverse telecine (IVTC), reverse 2:3 pulldown or sometimes pullup.

For live action shows it’s a bit more complicated as some are shot on film (most primetime dramas) then telecined for broadcast but some (soaps, reality shows, news, sports, etc) were shot with interlacing cameras. For this content, progressive frames are generated using various algorithms (bob, weave, blend, median, etc.) which all have different artifacts. I’m not really going to address this topic here.

Today, many are shot with HD cameras but that doesn’t really make this issue go away since half the formats are interlaced and the other half are progressive. Fortunately, I don’t find 1080i interlacing bothersome probably because the scanlines are so small (relative to scaled up scanlines from NTSC video).

A Note about Animation on Commercial DVDs

The mpeg stream on DVDs can be progressive 24 fps which side steps this whole issue. Almost all mainstream releases in recent times (Pixar, DreamWorks, etc) will be 480p24 (24fps, progressive) on the disk. I do have a couple indie DVDs (Old Man and the Sea comes to mind) which just put the telecine version on the disk so this post applies to them, too. Yuck.

First, I confirmed these were telecined by using the "." key in mplayer or slow-mo in xine to see the individual frames. You’ll see a couple frames are fine then a couple have the interlacing.

Totem (the xine version) is the player I normally use but it looked pretty crummy when I turned on deinterlacing. In particular the edges of the titles looked deterioriated. I couldn’t find any settings for deinterlacing for totem. I’ll keep using this player for progressive content since I like the simple UI but it’s useless for interlaced content.

Xine sets deinterlacing on by default and it looks much better than totem’s algorithm (for animated content, that is). The tooltip claims it detects progressive content and does not deinterlace but I’m not sure what it’s doing there. Unfortunately, it does not appear to detect telecine content as the animated frames appeared to be blended frames. For example, a ball falling was ghosted in two locations. It looks like in the prefs it’s using the tvtime filter. It did a nice job on live action footage so this is probably my choice for interlaced live action content.

Mplayer (and gmplayer) by default does nothing about interlaced content (ie. just shows the interlaced frames) and doesn’t seem to have any option to toggle it on or off. But, of course, there are several filters buit-in which you can enable on the command line. One filter is "pullup" which reverses the 2:3 pulldown (telecine). They recommend chaining it to the "softskip" filter for some buffering or something like that. It works like a charm with my animated content. So, my new preferred player for telecined content is gmplayer with the pullup filter. For example:

gmplayer -vf pullup,softskip dvd://

Oh, and this doesn’t address the conversion from 24fps (original animation) to 60fps (projector) problem. That’s a subject for another post.

Posted by bruce as animation, computing at 1:02 AM UTC

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I just saw Hoodwinked. I almost didn’t go but I’m sure glad I did. Not because it’s a great movie but precisely because it’s an OK movie. It was better than expected partly because my expectations were low but also because they managed to make an entertaining movie. Not ground-breaking. Not moving. Not inspiring or thought-provoking. I didn’t think it was super funny either but it was funny enough.

The story had some interesting stuff (I liked the Rashomon-like multiple versions of the same events thing) but it lacked focus. I guess Red is supposed to be the main character but I didn’t really care much about her and her "arc" is pretty tired. The story seemed to be there to support the situations and gags which by themselves were reasonably original even though they were pop culture based.

There’s plenty to criticize from a production quality perspective, if you compare it to one our films or Pixar. Wooden animation, dead characters, some crazy camera work, inconsistent lighting, ridiculous FX (floating in the river was the worst), etc. But then there’s some shots with reasonable animation, lighting and FX. I’m really curious if mainstream America cares. It’s a cartoon, after all.

It did seem to me, but this may be my personal bias, that the animation flaws were the most glaring and feels like the animation "corner" should be the one to cut last. The rigs had issues but basically worked. The lighting didn’t stand out so must have basically worked. But some of the animation was very distracting. This is the primary lesson for me from this film. For Robots it was the how important cinematography is.

And it grossed $50mil domestically with a $15mil budget.

Posted by bruce as animation at 9:10 PM UTC

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Unfortunately, Zeke didn’t go to preschool today because we think he has the stomach bug I had last week. He said "I have a bad guy bug inside me." He tossed it twice yesterday and didn’t want ice cream so you know something is really wrong.

Fortunately it didn’t make me miserable, just nauseous for a few days and I was able to get back to work in a few days.

When I left, he was watching Spirit which has, I think, a very beautiful opening sequence. The flying camera work is superb — it’s dynamic but doesn’t feel like a rollercoaster — a common pitfall of many 3D CG camera moves. It interesting to see how they accomplish this, too. At one point, for example, the camera zooms in a little so we only see the bird and the river. This gives us a visual break from a big swoop that preceded it since the water is relatively simple background.

Posted by bruce as animation, kids at 10:54 AM UTC

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 Just came out of a screening of all the animated shorts
nominated for an oscar. Overall, I’d say they were all excellent and
diverse. Here’s my reactions to each in the order I saw them.

The Moon and the
Son: An Imagined Conversation – John Canemaker’s intimate paternal biography (28:00)

Wow,
very personal and raw. Some segments were uncomfortable to watch but
this is what gives it power. Taps a fear I suspect many fathers have
that their sons or daughters will remember the bad memories over the good ones. A great real-life story of struggle and unwise actions motivated by good intention.
At 28 minutes this is the longest one and it was screened on video as
it was produced in video. I loved the mix of media he used — stills, home
movies, reference footage, hand drawn cels and how well they were woven
together.

9 – Shane Acker’s post-apocalyptic
thriller (10:50)

I saw an excerpt at Siggraph and boy this works much better seeing the complete short. Called a student film but made by a pro over several (4?) years between production work. I love the gritty, post-industrial atmosphere. I liked the minimal lighting and I thought the animation was solid too with the character having nice reactions and emotions. Not clear on the message of the story but I’m pretty thick about these things sometimes. The sound design superbly added another dimension to this film although a few times it seemed too obvious but maybe the volume in the screening room was too loud.

Badgered – Sharon Colman’s charmer (7:04)

Well executed story, charming character and excellent minimal animation.

The Mysterious
Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello – Anthony Lucas’ mini-epic shadow play (27:00)

I saw this on Friday at an ASIFA event at DeAnza college on video (seems like an older projector, too) . Seeing it in 35mm with a good sound system (although there were some glitches in the film copy) made a huge difference. Another case where the sound design really enriches the film. I loved the silhouette style and I appreciated the subtle use of 3D. I enjoyed the story, partially because I like sci-fi but mainly because there was mystery at the beginning about what I was seeing (classic sci-fi) and I didn’t know was going to happen. And I liked the ending – tragic but not dark for the sake of it.

This is my pick for the oscar.

One Man Band – Mark Andrews and Andrew Jimenez from Pixar (4:30)

Super high production values (as we all expect) but I couldn’t rally around the story. Actually, I guess the characters really because the story is kind of interesting with the little girl’s skill. I didn’t find the playing of either one man band very appealing.

Posted by bruce as animation at 1:21 PM UTC

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That’s it. It’s official — I’m a REAL genius. Alias’ web site says so.

Excellent, a superior performance–ten out of ten answers were correct.
If you got a perfect score on the first try then you’re a REAL genius.

Here’s the challenge:

Take a look at the ten images below. Some of them are photographs
of real objects or scenes, others are created by computer graphics
(CG) artists. Test your ability to tell which among the array of
images are real, and which are CG.

 Give it a try!

Posted by bruce as animation at 1:47 PM UTC

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I needed some blank storyboard paper and found a great Sober: Storyboard Template from sober.

Thanks!

Posted by bruce as animation at 1:44 PM UTC

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I’ve been wanting a blog for a while now to capture:

• fun memories of the kids,
• notes on animated films I’ve seen, want to create, or am creating,
• trials and tribulations in the quest for the ultimate espresso,
• experiences and lessons related to building my physical vitality,
• observations of an unhappy or happy consumer,
• nerdly activities (struggles and successes) including TiVo hacking, and
• usability yeahs and boos.

I experimented with the more general Mambo CMS system but finally settled on WordPress because it’s really much more streamlined for blogging. I’ll be posting stuff in the past and will move this post back in time so it’s the first post so to be honest, the actual creation date of the blog was Nov. 16, 2005.

Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, animation, coffee, kids, usability, vitality at 12:23 PM UTC

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