Quote:
Originally Posted by PLA 
I do not understand the benefit of reverse telecine. Upscaling 480p to 1080p does not give you a clearer picture. Creating a frame rate not present on the original recording through software manipulation cannot result in a clearer picture either. Yes the avp-a1 can do it but is there a true benefit to this manipulation?
I do not understand the benefit of reverse telecine. Upscaling 480p to 1080p does not give you a clearer picture. Creating a frame rate not present on the original recording through software manipulation cannot result in a clearer picture either. Yes the avp-a1 can do it but is there a true benefit to this manipulation?
Well, the idea is is that you are "undoing" the frame rate processing that was done when the DVD was mastered. Film is encoded at 24fps, but for broadcast on traditional televisions and for DVDs (which were developed specifically for television display), the frame rate had to be manipulated to 30fps to match those TVs' 60Hz refresh rate. That's all well and good, except that the process requires frame repetitions, resulting in the telecine judder we all know and love from watching DVDs and movies broadcast on TV all these years.
But now, our modern displays can refresh at some multiple of the original 24fps (usually 72Hz or 120Hz), rendering telecine obsolete for BDs since they retain the native frame rate. But DVDs are forever telecined and encoded at 480i/60, as are TV broadcasts of film-based content.
So, inverse telecine is meant to "undo" telecine's frame rate manipulation. In a perfect world, that's a great idea because you are restoring the content to its native format. That's kind of the Holy Grail for film aficionados...watching it the way it was originally meant to be watched, at 24fps.
But DVD mastering, it turns out, is a messy and imperfect process, and the imperfections can sometimes be magnified by the inverse telecine process. This can show up as jumps or obvious dropped frames, for example. And for some (but not all) of us, that's more annoying than telecine judder itself.
BTW, upscaling 408i to 1080p is a different processing task from inverse telecine (actually two, including de-interlacing). But I wanted to add that, especially with the sophisticated VP chips in our modern players & processors, it does indeed result in a much clearer picture. Most of our displays are now fixed-pixel technology, so it's very hard to even do an AB comparison anymore (they output everything at their native resolution, usually 1080, no matter what you feed them). But if you could do that comparison, you'd be reminded that there's a night-and-day difference between watching a DVD at 480i/p and watching the same DVD played in a good BD player at either 1080p/60 or 1080p/24.
I wasn't making an argument...I was explaining what the technology does (since you said you didn't understand it). Your analogy implies you're talking about upscaling, and nobody is claiming that it restores the video to its original resolution with all the film information intact, but it does most definitely improve the image quality of a 480i DVD.
Upscaling, deinterlacing.....that's all stuff the AVP does! 
