Blowup 720 x 576 to Flat

[Shai Skiff]

Hi,
What is the right way to make NTSC (ProRes 720 x 576) DCP?
In easyDCP Creator the transcoding from 23.97 to 24 is great, but the blowup / scaling from 720 x 576 to 1998 × 1080 is not too much?

[Marcel Birgelen]

When converting from TV formats like NTSC and PAL to DCP content, there are multiple things you need to take care of:

NTSC is 60p interlaced
PAL is 50p interlaced

The first thing that's important is the de-interlacing. Depending on the transcoding software, there are multiple algorithms that can do this, but none of them will be perfect.
Pulldown conversion from NTSC to 24p will come with some noticeable artifacts too.

Then, you need to blow up the resolution. I guess you're going to pillar-box the content? No matter what algorithm you're going to be using, such a blow-up will never look great, in my opinion. If you're in for some experimentation, there are some interesting AI-upscaling projects, like this one. Some of them show pretty promising results.

[Carsten Kurz]

What is the source? If you're lucky, you may be able to perform a clean inverse telecine on the NTSC material. Probably not in EasyDCP. I'd suggest Handbrake. That would be better than just a plain de-interlace.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Some of the more advanced de-interlacing algorithms I've seen, nowadays seem to recognize inverse telecine scans and essentially just paste the image together instead of trying to interpolate the image. I highly recommend ffmpeg for all kinds of conversions. Handbrake uses ffmpeg internally if I remember correctly.