24p film to PAL 25 encoding

[mp3dom]

Hi to all!
I have a small animation with its audio at 24p (SD at 720x576) and I want to put on DVD. My first option was to speedup the video and the audio by 4% but this will change the pitch in the audio and also change the length of the video (which If possibile I would like to keep original). To correct at least the pitch I can apply the timestretch but this couldn't resolve the problem of the video length. The second option was to encode to 24fps and then apply, with DGPulldown, the pulldown to obtain a legal PAL 25 fps file... but I have some doubts. In particular... with a software pulldown I have seen that on PC the playback remain at 24 fps (so the decoder discard the pulldown information) and this is wonderful but what's happened on interlaced and progressive televisions? The dvd player repeat the frames thus showing judder on motion scenes? Or simply will discard the pulldown flag showing true 24p film? Also is it better to have the source at 24p or 23.976p (to go to PAL) or is it not so important? Thanks.

[scharfis_brain]

you have some options:

1) speedup
2) telecine 24p to 50i, which will introduce 2 minor stutters every second on TV-sets.
2a) using DGPulldown (good solution)
2b) using interlaced video encoding (bad solution)
3) Framerate conversion
3a) using blending (avoids stutter at the cost of ghosts)
3b) using motion interpolation (avoids stutter at the cost of occasional weird image errors)

I strongly suggest you to use 1) or 2a).
Which one to choose depends on your personal preferance/taste. Both methods are fully compatible with the DVD-standard.

[Guest]

what's happened on interlaced and progressive televisions? The dvd player repeat the frames thus showing judder on motion scenes? Or simply will discard the pulldown flag showing true 24p film? Also is it better to have the source at 24p or 23.976p (to go to PAL) or is it not so important? Thanks. The one field judder is not so bad compared to a one frame judder. I doubt you'd notice it if you weren't looking for it. I don't know of any players that can undo irregular pulldown like that, because they are typically looking for a 3:2 pattern. But I could be wrong about that, as I am not so familiar with DVD player internals. The difference between 23.976 and 24 for your source material is insignificant if you use DGPulldown.

scharfi's summary is accurate and concise -- something we've come to expect and appreciate from him!

[mp3dom]

Yes, thank you very much to both of you. Since the source is progressive the idea is to encode as progressive to maximize the encoding quality so absolutely the choice will be between 1 and 2a. I was hoping that a software pulldown could be undo in some way by the dvd player (or help the process) since it knows (by the mpeg2 flags) which fields need to repeat.