I had previously made an entry into this blog about recreating 60fps progressive frames from 30fps interlaced sources, a process commonly referred to as Bob Deinterlacing. In this entry I suggested using AviSynth and a filter called TomsMoComp, but I am here today to tell you otherwise.

Obviously, as time passes we learn things and our experience may contradict what we previously thought was true. The same holds true for my opinion of TomsMoComp. It is a great filter but it was not meant to be used as a Bob Deinterlacer and it does not perform as well on game footage as other methods. I can't tell you exactly why it doesn't because I have only passing familiarity with how TomsMoComp works internally. Gunnar Thalin's SmoothDeinterlace works without motion compensation and only has the option of blending or interpolating those sections of a frame that are interlaced. This is simpler than looking for pixels which have moved around and more importantly for (partially) 2D sources: creates much fewer artifacts of misplaced objects. Sure, motion adaptive stuff may be cutting edge and look better for real life scenes, but that's just not what I was looking for. Look at how some guy rates SmoothDeinterlace below TomsMoComp over here. That just goes to show it's all about the application. Adaptive deinterlacing methods are called so because they leave non-moving parts of the video untouched. I believe this is just another way of saying area-based deinterlacing, but I could have my terminology mixed up.

Now down to the grits. You can get the SmoothDeinterlace plugin for AviSynth here. It was ported to AviSynth by some cool dude. Just as a sidenote: The guys that program all this stuff are real heroes to me, because they create something very useful in their free time and then release it free of charge for the benefit of the world. So anyway, put that DLL in your AviSynth plugin folder and you're ready to start using it in your scripts. Read the documentation for an explanation of how the parameters work. Changing the static threshold and history values will get rid of some blinking pixels in lines that are only one pixel thick. Turn on doublerate and now you have your 60fps (or double your original rate) video.