PAL > NTSC DVD transfer

[Spazmogen]

Hello.

I've got 2 British DVD's (PAL) that I'd like to watch on my TV (NTSC).

What's the best way to go about it?

Presently, I ripped the movie into one big VOB with smart ripper.
I have used BeSweet to get a .wav from the .ac3 file.


Should I frame serve it (DVD2AVI) or run the whole sequence inside of TMPGEnc?

I'm trying to go from 25fps PAL to 23.976fps NTSC with perfect A/V sync.

As I see it, I need to do a 3:2 pulldown to keep the motion smooth...
and process the audio to the correct length then MUX it again before I author the DVD.

Am I on the right track?

Of course, I could just buy a Philips DVP-642 DVD player and be done with it. But its a challenge now to solve it.

[Spazmogen]

Looks like Inverse 3:2 pulldown is the answer.

I did a test clip of 14 minutes, and all seems fine, even the audio was in sync.

But it takes forever to process. The VBR 2 pass took nearly 5 hours on my P3 1ghz system with 740mb PC133 ram.

The final quality is worth it. It plays fine, not even 1 stutter at all.

The final file is 57 minutes. So it should take 24 hours or so to process it all.

[Happygolucky]

I regularly take PAL avi's and convert them to NTSC DVD mpegs. I use TMPGEnc and AVISynth for the video, and BeSweet/BeSweetGUI for the audio.

I create an avs script for AVISynth with lines like this, you would do similar with the .d2v file created by DVD2AVI as the source:

AVISource("video.avi",false)
AssumeFPS(23.976)

Feed this .avs file to TMPGenc as the source, it should automatically detect it as 23.976 and do a 3:2 Pulldown as it is encoding, you don't need to alter those settings in TMPGEnc (at least I never have). With a 57 minute program, you should be able to speed things up considerably by using VBR (Constant Quality) with a setting of 100. You should hardly, if at all, see any loss of quality from doing a 2-pass VBR encode but it will be nearly twice as fast.

Using BeSweet/BeSweetGUI you can take the audio you demuxed and change the frame rate from 25fps to 23.976fps so that when you then author your DVD and merge the video and audio they will sync perfectly.