PAL/NTSC menu's

robertglotzbach wrote on 3/12/2005, 10:04 AM

Hello all,

This is something I would have tried myself, but since I'm stil running the trial version I cannot, however I would like to continue with this project.
I want to output my project to both NTSC and PAL. I live in a PAL country so I guess i should render to both systems from Vegas.
But what should I do with my menu's; I allready created my menu's for PAL. Should I let DVDA convert them or would it be better if I would make new menu's for NTSC (655*480)?
I guess there will be a quality difference between the two, will it be big?
I don't mind to do some extra work, I just want it to look good.

Thank you in advance.

Comments

mbryant wrote on 3/15/2005, 5:05 AM

I’ve done this 2 different ways – but in both cases I haven’t remade the menus… just let DVD-A create the menus. The quality seems good to me.. I guess what you are saying is to re-encode any background media, I don’t think this is necessary.

Method 1: As you are planning, encode your video(s) in both PAL and NTSC from Vegas (render directly from your PAL AVI to NTSC MPEG to create the NTSC one). Create a PAL DVD in DVD-A. Then, use that same DVD-A project, and simply replace the video file(s) with the NTSC ones. If you use the same filename(s) you won’t have to change anything in the DVD-A project, other than the project properties (change it to NTSC).

Method 2: Let DVD-A do the conversion. Create your PAL DVD, then after this is done change the properties to NTSC and create the NTSC one.

Method 1 should be better quality, as you are encoding from the less compressed DV/avi source, and you also have more control over the encoding from Vegas. I find I have trouble telling the difference.

When using Method 1, what another user recommended (and seems to work well) is to set de-interlace method to “blend fields”, and set Reduce Interlace Flicker to ON for all events, then render out using NTSC template. See this thread:

NTSC Conversion

Mark