The problem comes probably because the source is an upscale (most probably from an half-hd source like 960x540). The source suffers from huge aliasing and this confuses TFM to detect combed frames even if the frames are clean. In the screenshot that you've posted, the book's page suffer from aliasing and TFM think is combed and so it deinterlace it with the tdeint+eedi combo. If you disable the deinterlacing you'll get only 'clean' frames (the aliasing still remains, so probably you should use an antialias script). If you try a plain xxxsource("xxx.dga") tfm(PP=1,display=true,mode=1,slow=2,micmatching=3,order=1) you'll see that in your screenshot TFM flag the frame as combed on the book's page. PP=1 tells TFM to detect combed frames but not deinterlace it. display=true shows the metrics used by TFM. You can remove the display=true if you want.