TServo2049 said:
On the subject of telecine smearing, I actually don't know that much about telecine ...
Clunky telecine is just frame doubling at various points, enough times to create 30 fps. The better and more clever way (and most used) is doubling and mixing fields of those frames:
Of course, this is the theory. Some equipment is just plain sloppy in applying it.
Sounds like what SpacedRanger was talking about, though this transfer doesn't seem to have the exact issue he mentioned.
I since went back to my notes and remembered that there were full fields that were superimposed, too! My fix was to invert a same, clean field (found elsewhere in the mix) and superimpose that over the superimpose-corrupted field to cancel out the one field -- resulting in a (mostly) clean other field. Wild, yes? :) [A side effect of this process was compressed levels on the remaining field, which needed to be processed / expanded. I hated the idea of extra processing, but I never took it any further -- a working theory was good enough at the time.]
... the "early bird" frame seems to be visible from top to bottom, but its opacity isn't regular. ... Each of these smeary images shows up in the bottom field of one frame, and the top field of the next.
This was the "half field" superimposed fields of my previous post.
Maybe the PS78 transfer has this kind of issue, and there are no "discrete" frames to speak of. If so, perhaps it'd just be best to blend the identical fields together to make it 30p?
Frames should always be recoverable except, perhaps, if a telecine itself was telecined (I know that sounds ludicrous but I've seen webpages documenting some examples). In those cases, judicious blending is used to make the best of a bad situation.