Conversion from NTSC AVI to PAL MPEG2

Baylo wrote on 4/20/2003, 9:05 PM

Hi all,

Just looking for a quick reality check here. I'm converting my wedding tapes to DVD for a) general use so the DV tapes can be stored and not used, and b) gifts for the parents.

I've already done the NTSC DVDs. The conversion from avi to mpeg2 took just over 2.5hrs for the 2hr video (this on a 2.4GHz PIV w/ 512MB RAM).

I'm now doing a PAL version as my family lives in the UK. I have the avi original files on the timeline and I render as DVD Architect PAL MPEG2 @ 4,200 mbps bitrate. There are no FX, etc on the timeline at all. The most complicated thing is one brief crossfade, otherwise it's all footage captured straight from tape.

How long should this reasonably take? The computer has been rendering now for 4.5hrs and it has only rendered the first 2 and a bit minutes. At this rate it's going to take over a week to do the full video!!! Surely this can't be right?

I realise that it's a complicated process to go from NTSC avi to PAL mpeg, but this seems wrong. Should I render to PAL avi first, then convert?

Any suggestions appreciated, especially from those who have experienced this.

Thanks,

Mark

Comments

CrazyRussian wrote on 4/20/2003, 10:27 PM

Just send them your NTSC disk, they should be fine viewing it. Most TVs in EU are mylti system, DVD player will read it fine, since your disk doesnt have region restrictions, and if TV is multi system, it will have no trouble decoding it.
Rendering that long is not right, what i remember reading from other posts here: it could be .veg file problem - project file get corrupted somehow. If it's mostly just video with very few effects, just redo it and try encoding again. My collections of 39 different AVI and MPG files in PAL format took little over 12 hours to encode for NTSC DVD (2hrs 20 min total playing time).

Baylo wrote on 4/21/2003, 9:42 AM

Thanks for the response. I actually gave up after 5.5hrs (at which point 3 minutes had been rendered) and cancelled the render. I think there was some sort of system problem because everything was extremely sluggish. I shut down Vegas, relaunched it and started the render again. Everything is much better now - I'm on target for a 14.5hr render, which is much more acceptable. :-)

The suggestion to use the NTSC disk is a good one, except that I know my parent's TV is not NTSC compatible...

Cheers,

Mark