Newbie - converting from NTSC to PAL ??

[stu_marine]

Hi guys,

Im having problems with burning Xvid files on to DVD+rs with Nero Vision 4 (Nero 7 Ultra Edition).

When I preview the film in PAL mode i see the film is jerking every second and i myself can really notice this. However if i changed the options to NTSC I dont get the jerkeyness at all in the preview window.

I need to burn to PAL so it can be watched on the home DVD players (all PAL mode).

Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I presume I may have to convert this through another programme?

Thanks in advance

Stuart

[manono]

Hello and welcome to the forum,

I need to burn to PAL so it can be watched on the home DVD players (all PAL mode).

Does that mean that your players are some of the probably less than 1% of PAL DVD players that can't play NTSC DVDs? Have you tried?

Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I presume I may have to convert this through another programme?

Nero Vision is a piece of junk. If you're a rookie, you should probably get your feet wet doing some regular old PAL backups. NTSC2PAL conversions are a degree of magnitude more difficult. You can do them in a couple of ways. One would be to speed up both the audio and video to 25fps and resize to 720x576 for PAL, followed by authoring. The other would be to resize it but keep it at 23.976fps, keep the audio unchanged (except perhaps for a conversion to AC3 or MP2 audio, if necessary), encode the video followed by using DGPulldown set for 23.976->25fps and authoring.

There's a fairly decent guide here:

http://www.ntsc2pal.hostrocket.com/FramesetPOS2.htm

His explanation of the speed-up method is fairly good. His method of keeping the audio and video the same length isn't worth a damn. If you don't have access to a decent commercial software MPEG-2 encoder, I'd recommend the HC Encoder used together with AviSynth. Doom9 has a good guide here:

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/hc.htm

For getting the AviSynth script for resizing AVIs for DVD, FitCD is the way to go.

[Nick]

Firstly to second manono's point - try an NTSC DVD in your player as it will almost certainly work. I, like you, are in the UK and routinely play NTSC DVDs without any problem.

If not, you might like to try DVD2SVCD - it does more than the name suggests. It is slightly more complex than "one click" software but there is a good guide on AVI to DVD with DVD2SVCD in the guides section of the Doom9 main site.

A couple of added thoughts, though:

By default the software has "Use Source Audio" checked in the Audio section. Unless your files have AC3 audio, uncheck this.

There is a checkbox "AVI AR is 1:1" in the Conversion tab, which is unchecked by default and will need to be checked.


The reason I recommend this software for you is that, once set up, you will be able to do numerous similar conversions pretty much one-click. Also, if you load an NTSC AVI as the source file, a checkbox labelled "NTSC2PAL" lights up and does this step for you.