PAL -> NTSC conversion for DVD

[nhope]

I want to sell NTSC DVD's to Japanese and American customers, but all my DV and TV equipment is PAL.

Having had some success with using TMPGenc to translate my Premiere DV footage from PAL to NTSC MPEG-1 for VCD (and no complaints from the customers), I am hoping to be able to create an acceptable NTSC MPEG-2 stream for DVD's using CCE. I know it won't be as good as PAL. For my first effort I exported the footage from my PAL Premiere project at NTSC settings and encoded it as NTSC in CCE. It comes out stripey on my PAL TV during periods of vertical movement, but then it's a PAL TV, not NTSC. So...

1. Does anyone have any experience of this?
2. Is it better to resize the footage and change the framerate in an interim program, rather than in Premiere?
3. Is the final DVD likely to look as stripey on a true NTSC TV?
4. What settings should I be using in CCE?
5. Is this better done in TMPGenc?

Thanks,

Nick

[auenf]

firstly, get yourself a tv that can playback in PAL and NTSC, will save you a bit of hassle.

if you are happy with the results of TMPEG in the PAL->NTSC conversion, then use it to create an avi if you really want to use CCE for the mpeg-2 encoding.

for the company logo on the dvds here, i just exported the 25fps PAL project to 720x480 and 29.97fps, runs slow, but its not that long of a clip ;)

Enf...

[robshot]

1, record or create your video in progressive 25fps mode. this will help the pal 2 ntsc conversion at a later stage.
2. in premiere, you can interpret the video (in timeline) as 24p. Then you correct the audio pitch, usually using soundforge and make it 104% pitch corrected.
3. By the time you finish with the timeline, you can output a 24p video stream to CCE, which you can encode as is.
4. After CCE session done, use pulldown exe

pulldown source.m2v final.m2v -tff even -prog_seq p -prog_frames i

you will have a 24p mpeg2 (with corrected speed as 29.97fps) + pulldown flag to allow ntsc playback, a progressive sequence with interlace frame type.

I did this several times just to test it, successfully. Remember the source is progressively recorded. There is no simple way to do this when you create/record the video in interlace mode, since in movement scenes, the interlacing will bound your video like Tiberian Bats!

[nhope]

Thanks again Enf,

Actually even though they were made here in Thailand, both my TV’s are multi-system in that they can handle NTSC playback as well as PAL. I don’t think my stripiness was caused by that.

I have now got a good result by just frameserving regular PAL DV-AVI from Premiere to TMPGenc and letting that do the PAL -> NTSC and the MPEG-2 all at once (and no Tiberian bats!). But I still want to pursue the CCE route as I’ll do ANYTHING to save time. However encoding my PAL AVI into an NTSC AVI using TMPGenc ready for CCE is taking nearly as long as it takes TMPGenc to encode the MPEG-2 (and for some reason it also plays back in super-slow-motion in WMP).

Robshot, I think I have to always shoot in interlaced mode so that my stuff looks as good as possible on TV for people who buy my PAL products. If I did a de-interlace as I export from Premiere, that would turn it into progressive, wouldn’t it? And by “24P” you mean 24fps progressive, right? Are you using that because it’s the nearest Premiere offers to 20.85, (which is 25*25/29.97)? By my calculations the result would play back at 115% of real time and your audio would need pitch-correcting by that figure too, not 104%??? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

Head about to explode.

Nick

[robshot]

nhope:

yes, deinterlacing would allow creation of progressive frames, with a price, of course. But that's a different story :). Do deinterlace if you like and the result is ok with you.

As for 24p, yes i meant 24p, but the calculation is not 25*25/29.97. It's 25*25/24(or 23.976). The 29.97fps is the number after pulldown. So it is 104.

cheers

rob

[nhope]

Cheers! Head has actually now exploded. I think I need to go and find myself a nice simple primer on interlaced/progressive/PAL/NTSC etc etc!

[nhope]

I now understand that the main purpose of Pulldown is to convert 24fps progressive material to 29.97fps interlaced :)

Thanks so much for your help Robshot. I’ve spent all day (yes, I'm sad) trying to make your method work by de-interlacing my footage as I export from Premiere and seeing if the result will end up acceptable.

It took me a few hours to discover that the CLIPS themselves in Premiere have to be re-interpreted as 24fps. If you just export the timeline with the video set to 24fps, the result still comes out at 25fps!

I then discovered that Wavelab doesn’t have a straight 104% pitch-correction. However upping the pitch by 90% of a semi-tone sounds about right though. Audiophiles out there, please feel free to correct me!

Then DVDit! complained that the “data exceeded multiplexable bitrate”. So I tried again at CBR 6Kbps instead of CBR 8Kbps, and DVDit! made it past the multiplexing. However now I’ve hit a brick wall where DVDit! fails straight after the multiplexing stage because of an “unknown error” :( It still does this if I issue the pulldown command without the prog_seq and prog_frames options.

Any ideas?

Nick