This started out as a description for my latest YouTube video (Which isn't really mine, shoutout to Stewart Cheifet), but it turned out so good I'm reposting it here with a bit of extra information.
Analog NTSC television, i.e. the stuff North Americans and the Japanese saw on old CRT TV before digital stuff was always 60 fields per second. There were 480 lines from top to bottom, and the TV would draw the odd numbered lines, followed by the even numbered lines in a endless ping pong back and forth. It would draw 30 of each in a second to produce 60 "fields" per second, each field made of half the image. Because of how fast the TV did this and human persistence of vision, you would see the image as 60 frames per second.
That's all good, but then computers came along with monitors that draw the entire image all at once. If you were to play a straight NTSC TV signal on a "progressive" computer monitor as it's known, the image would flicker 60 times a second because it's trying to draw 60 full frames a second, but for each frame only half the image is there. Yikes!
When old NTSC TV signals are converted to be played on a computer, in this case over the Internet, various encoding methods are used to erase the flicker, often at the cost of the video being reduced to 30 full frames per second.
But if you download an episode of The Computer Chronicles from The Internet Archive, specifically one of the video files that ends with the file extension .mpeg, you have something interesting: a video file containing all 60 fields, that when played on a computer monitor will play two back-to-back half frames at the same time to get 30 full frames a second. BUT: when played back on the right equipment will adapt itself to play back at 60 fields per second! So the question is, can you trick a computer into playing 60 fields per second, but without the flickering?
I'll cut straight to the chase and tell you what you need to do if you have VEGAS Pro, or Sony Vegas for the old folk out there.
Field order: None (progressive scan)
Frame rate: 59.940 (Double NTSC)
Deinterlace method: Interpolate fields
If you don't understand how it works, it's complicated. Just trust me, it does. Or at least, you get the results you see here on YouTube. Just remember if you are uploading to YouTube to have the video height set to at least 720 pixels, adjusting the width to match the original aspect ratio using this calculator. If you don't have the height set to at least 720 pixels, then YouTube will max out the frame rate at 30fps, making all your effort entirely pointless.
Some people reading this article might have a related question: "How do I get my old videotapes to be 59.94 fps in the first place?"
There are two answers to that, and they are both quite simple to answer:
If you are digitizing from DV tapes, i.e. miniDV, just don't use a dumbed down transfer program such as Windows Movie Maker. Instead, use a professional, commercial, or broadcast grade tape transfer program that will store your videos in uncompressed .avi files. Since I have VEGAS Pro, I have VEGAS Video Capture built in. Then, use the tutorial posted above to get the 59.94 fps you desire, and just to be safe never attempt to re encode those massive AVI files into anything else. I assume you are looking for maximum preservation, after all.
If you are looking to digitize old analog videotapes, like VHS, Video8, Hi8, Betamax, etc. just follow this video and you'll be good. The only differences between this method and mine is that I use a USB 3.1 HDMI capture card fed into OBS Studio, and I use OBS Studio to configure the capture card to run at 59.94 fps. Running it at 60 fps causes those interlaced frames every few minutes you see in the linked YouTube video.
That's basically it.
UPDATE JAN. 18TH, 2023: Or so I thought! I recently discovered a simpler method for viewing 29.97i video in it's native 60Hz refresh rate. For some reason this only works with DV video stored in a .avi container, but if someone knows if and how this can apply to all 29.97i video, send me an E-Mail with instructions because not only would I like to put that on this page but I would like to know for myself. That said, this method is not exactly fit for redistribution as it doesn't interpolate the missing lines, meaning the video will seem dim at best, and flickery at worst. That said, if you just want to see your home movies shot on MininDV magically double their frame rate without much care for video quality, follow these steps:
Pretty easy compared to the VEGAS method, isn't it? Now if someone knows a way to get VLC Media Player's Convert/Save tool to re-export the video in this mode, that would be absolutely fantastic. But alas, that's above my undertstanding.
Argot
Page created: Saturday, December 10th, 2022
Page last modified: Wednesday, Janurary 18th, 2023