Can you convert a PAL DVD to NTSC?

organism_seven wrote on 3/8/2004, 4:27 PM
Hi,

I have produced a PAL DVD for a friend who is in a local band based here in Liverpool, England.
He is planiing to go to the US for a few weeks and would like to sell an NTSC version of the DVD.
Can my original PAL DVD be converted.
Does he need to convert or would most DVD players in the US play the PAL version?
Can it be done with Vegas/DVD Architect or is some other software required.
Bear in mind that I no longer have the original edited DV footage.
All I have is the finished PAL DVD.
So, can this be done?
Any help appreciated.

Regards
Organism Seven.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 3/8/2004, 5:07 PM
Does he need to convert or would most DVD players in the US play the PAL version?

This was asked, in a recent thread, by someone from Australia. The answer is, no, the DVD players in the US don't play PAL DVDs.

There are also threads on doing the conversion, but I don't have them in my thread database here. Maybe someone else can help.
nolonemo wrote on 3/8/2004, 5:23 PM
You could take a look on dvdrhelp.com, there are a lot of tutorials on that site, and I bet PAL/NTSC conversion has been covered.
farss wrote on 3/8/2004, 6:30 PM
I've recently done this and I seem to recall giving a fairly detailed explanation fo how to do it. If you have the original assets then is a piece of cake of course. If not then here is summary:

Copy everything from DVD to folder, use DVD2AVI to extract audio, rename .VOB to .mpg, opend in Vegas, render as NTSC mpeg using DVDA NTSC template.

In DVDA rebuild DVD using new mpg files, original audio. You should also be able to extract menu backgrounds using DVD2AVI but you'll still need to build the actual menus, make certain DVDA project is set to NTSC.

Results should be acceptable, not as good as if you started out with original AVIs but in my case that was way too much work.
donp wrote on 3/8/2004, 8:42 PM
It's too late to go into it here but I did that very thin a month ago. Do a search on the threads, mine or someone else's will pop up.
alfredsvideo wrote on 3/9/2004, 2:15 PM
On my PAL system, I have only just recently rendered a one and a half hour movie, using the Vegas Architect NTSC template. It took 27 hours on my 1.6 machine. I then took it into Archtect, using the NTSC option in Properties. Letters from America indicate that it works just fine.