This just got asked two days ago.

PAL to NTSC questions

Must admit I've never worried about matching the AR, I've assumed Vegas would take care of that, have I been making a blunder or has SPOT been doing an unnecessary step?
Bob.

Hi Bob. If your footage can take the crop without losing anything important, cropping 576 to 480 will produce a better output because Vegas does not have to rescale the video.

The main conversion problem from PAL to NTSC is though is usually the extra frames that have to be created. In some places, especially where there is camera panning, the results after conversion can be quite jerky.

Richard Hunter

I've done plenty of PAL to NTSC conversions and not noticed any jerkiness, I don't do any cropping either but what I do do is turn on Reduce Interlace Flicker on all events which seems to stop aliasing during rescaling, also I select blend fields for de-interlace method.
Seems, to every critical eye I've had cast over the results, to look about as good as it gets without motion compensation during de-interlacing, you do get some blur on fast moving objects.
Bob.

Bob, I don't always do this, but find I don't need to reduce interlace flicker nearly as often if I match it, probably due to the way it ends up being rescaled. I also often add just a *touch* of unsharp mask.

mandk, first try playing the pal dvd on your ntsc system... it'll work to some extent on newer dvd players, albeit with jerky motion in high-action scenes... but you may not need to hassle with converting it.

Hi Bob. Don't you find the output is a bit soft when you use Reduce Interlace Flicker? I try to avoid using it if possible because of that.

Richard

I've been using DVFilm Atlantis to go back and forth between PAL and NTSC. Doing it directly in Vegas looks fine to me except on pans, zooms and scrolling text where the extra added frames make it look jerky. DVFilm Atlantis does the conversion differently than Vegas. It does a 3:2 pulldown to go from 60 interlaced frames to 24 progressive, then speeds the generated 24p up 4% to get PAL's 25 fps. I usually take the extra step of loading the file into Sound Forge and transposing the pitch back down 4% so that the music isn't sharp. Which technique is better is debatable, butto my eyes at least, the DVFilm Atlantis method looks smoother on pans, zooms animations and scrolling text.

If you're interested check out the following link:
http://dvfilm.com/atlantis/index.htm

After reading your initial post again, I have a better solution. Buy a cheap Chinese DVD player that can play back PAL dvds. I have a CyberHome CH-DVD 300 that cost me all of $36 at Best Buy. Not only will it play back PAL dvd's, but with an extremely simple hack, can be made region free as well! Just make sure no disk is in the player, press "menu", "1, "9", then keep hitting the "enter" button until the region goes through all the regions and starts back at the beginning at "zero". Open and close the disk drawer and it will now play back DVD's back from anywhere in the world regardless of region or format! It also will play back progressive scan video, has component outs for HD TVs, will play back VCDs, Super VCDs, JPEG slideshows, and MP3s off of either CDRs or DVDRs. Not only that, but it seems to play back even the worst no-name DVD-Rs/DVD+R's smoothly.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1069297420815&skuId=6100961&type=product

There are some other cheap decks that work pretty well too, but so far the Cyberhome CH-DVD 300 is my favorite. If it only had a hack to remove the Macrovision it would be perfect.

Eh..... Laurence, wouldn't he also need to buy a PAL TV to watch it on?

Richard

Actually what I think it's doing is pulldown removal or ITC, I think you can that in Vegas as well BTW. Once you've done that you could just author it as a 24p DVD which will play our correctly in both PAL and NTSC. Well that's what I'm led to believe, have to test this out myself oneday. Thhis is only a good idea if the source was film of course!

SPOT,
thanks for the idea, I'll try that next time I have to do a transfer. I'm still meaning to get a transfer done through a Leitch to see how much better it looks as well.
Bob.

No, you don't need a PAL TV to play it back. Most PAL DVD players will convert NTSC on the fly, but going the other way around is not so common in the bigger makes. Cheap Chinease DVD players on the other hand will almost all convert PAL to NTSC to play back on NTSC TVs. My Cyberhome CH-DVD 300 will play back any disk, PAL or NTSC from any region on a regular NTSC TV. Not bad for $36!

I don't think you can do IVTC (Inverse Telecine, where you go from 29.97 fps interlaced back to 24 fps progressive) in Vegas. However, if you need to do it, I have three different ways to go, depending on how accurate you want it to be, and whether the source has some video mixed with the film footage. There is some amazingly clever software out there that deals with the interrupted patterns you typically get a scene changes in telecined film material.

I appreciate everyone's responses. I already have a cyberhome DVD player (plays most things but not a burned dvd+r.

Hi Laurence, thanks for the clarification.

Richard

That's weird. Just my Cyberhome DVD player plays DVD+R and DVD-R format disks equally well. Maybe I have a later model.

John Meyer: What are your three ways of doing Inverse Telecine? I'd love to know more about this.

I video in PAL; and need to create both PAL and NTSC DVDs from this.

For my PAL to NTSC conversions, I've been doing this:

1. Editing in Vegas, rendering to PAL MPEG
2. Creating the PAL DVD in DVD-A
3. Converting to NTSC in DVD-A, by simply changing the project settings to NTSC

This is easy, and seems to work pretty well... though I'm not an expert at judging picture quality.

Common sense says it would be better quality if for the NTSC version I rendered to NTSC MPEG in Vegas, as the DVD-A method involves a recompression (from PAL MPEG to NTSC). Should I change my flow to do this instead? How best to do this and limit the rework in DVD-A? What I mean is: the nice thing about my current flow is once I've got my DVD as I like it on PAL, it is just one change of the properties needed. With the alternate flow I'm not sure how I'd do this... either change all the filenames, or play a trick where I just replace the media files with an NTSC one with the same name? Would this work?

Mark

Ok, I'm in the process of trying this myself... I'm going to render to NTSC in Vegas using Bob's (farss) suggestions and see if I can tell the difference!

I figure I'll be able to then copy my DVD-A project and just swap the media files around...

I'd still like to hear any views regarding if it is worth doing this, as it is easier to do it in DVD-A.

Mark

All I do is after I've got the PAL DVD settled down is go back and encode from the Vegas TL (using the settings I mentioned previously) to a mpg file of the same name except I add "-NTSC", you don't even need to redo the audio.
Now I open my DVDA project and change it's properties to NSTC and Save As same name but again add "-NSTC". Then I navigate to the actual video and just change the mpg file to the -NSTC version, the same audio file works fine, I also reload the chapter markers just in case although this may not be necessary.
Then prepare and burn as per usual.
One tip, some times DVDA looses the plot and will still insist on re-encoding that which it doesn't need to, try save, close and re-open fixes things.
Bob.