Some Pulldown Advice Needed

Question

I'm working with some video of legacy films, some >50 years old. Unfortunately, much of the original film is unavailable to me. What I have is either DVD or sometimes VHS copies of the telecined results.
When I read about pulldown, it talks about a 3:2 pattern consisting of 3 whole frames and 2 with interlacing. What I instead see seems to be 2 whole frames with 3 interlaced in the five frame group. It also appears that the cadence may not be uniform throughout. If I look at the pattern a some point, and then look at some multiple of 5 frames later, the pattern seems to have shifted.
I've tried all the different options to reverse telecine the clips, but nothing seems to work consistently through the whole clip. Sometimes major sections seem to have been fixed, but later on there is trouble. Is there anything i can do with Cinema Tools to solve this, and is this pattern a telecine result or are there other issues involved.
Message was edited by: Eugene Cronshagen
Message was edited by: Eugene Cronshagen

Answer 1

hello Eugene C,
there are good descriptions of the 3:2 frames to fields relationships elsewhere ... i believe even the FCP manual may have this covered now.
as to irregular cadence of the pattern ... this could be caused by a number of things, but the most obvious i can think of are:
- video fields doubled somewhere during a bad dub or encoding process
- editing of the video after telecine
if there are obvious edits in the video material, you may try breaking it down into separate shots (one quicktime per shot) and doing reverse telecine on each shot, each one having its own cadence.
if not, you may be stuck doing lengthy troubleshooting ... do a reverse telecine on the whole clip so that it begins correctly ... find where it starts to go incorrect, go back to the original, break the clip there, repeat the process starting with that clip.
there is another possibility: that your original film was not transferred with proper speed lock and therefor improper and irregular 3:2 and pulldown occurred ... if this is the case, the 3:2 cadence will change in the middle of shots with no apparent pattern ... if this is the case there is no real way (easy or otherwise) to remove the irregular patter of doubled fields.
R.