South Park Season 12 BD-HD

[SimonM]

I have a problem with South Park Season 12 in that it appears to have undergone "telecine" because the discs contain video stored at 29.97 FPS, but the source animation appears to have been 24 (23.98) FPS. This results in 2 out of 5 filler frames that appear as shadow mergers between the enclosing frames. To make matters worse, the filler frames are often subsequent frames, making them very noticeable even during normal playback. I know this because I have the following Season 13 that does not suffer from this. It is stored as 23.98 FPS and encodes extremely well. So well that I could ramp down RF to 12 with 10-bit HEVC and still achieve my targeted 1 GB per episode.

So isn't this what "detelecine" is supposed to fix? Apparently not, or it doesn't work well or at all with animation or these particular discs. Bizarrely, even if I forced the frame rate down to 23.98 (which I know you're not supposed to do because it will cut "good" frames) still resulted in file sizes up to double my aforementioned Season 13 episodes.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything that can be done, but please let me know if you can suggest otherwise. It appears to be that Season 12 (at least in Australia) is poorly produced and worth avoiding on Blu-Ray. They didn't even end up releasing many seasons here. It's a shame, because Season 13 is great and produces fantastic rips, far exceeding the DRM-locked iTunes versions (not that that's hard). Every frame looks like it could be a print and you really notice the fine texture details in the "paper". I even had to compress the image to be able to upload it (the frame is 8.7 MB as a PNG).