BACKGROUND INFORMATION

For my next preservation project, I'm working with a childhood classic: Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. Thomas was shot on 35mm from 1984-2003 in 25fps, being that the production was based out of London. Once the third season began, the editor John L. Wright started to speed up footage for certain shots and would output the episodes in 25i for TV airings. This went on until 2008, when they switched to strictly progressive shooting for their new animation technique and have kept with it.

When Thomas was brought over to the US, Anchor Bay took up distribution. Their releases contained pulldown, but were plagued with dot crawl. Anchor Bay also only had access to lower end analog masters, unlike the UK that were given much better masters of the episodes.

Thomas hit DVD in the UK with multiple complete season releases. The DVDs are great quality, but in PAL/25i. The US has only one complete season release (dated back to 2004).

THE GOAL

Basically, I'm looking to convert the PAL DVD files to NTSC 30i so I can play it on all players in my household (many don't support 50hz material). I had dropped the file in Vegas and put it in an NTSC project. While I achieved my goal, the video has lots of horizontal linear shaking, especially when text was on the screen. There was no judder or any other problem, just the linear shaking.

I had also tried rendering it without any resampling, but when the interlaced footage appeared, it was very jittery.

I've seen many companies able to convert 25i material to 30i with no shaking, only ghosting due to pulldown, which is inevitable at this point, how did they do it? Is it even possible?