PAL to NTSC, Vegas is lousy! A LONG educational post with some questions... (farss and mbryant check this one!)

GTakacs wrote on 6/21/2004, 2:50 PM

Hi all, this is my very first post.

I have been lurking around for a while and searched a lot of archive posts relating to PAL and NTSC conversion.

I live in the US and I have friends and family living in Europe. I volunteered to convert all my father's old VHS8 tapes to DVD. These are all old analog PAL footage. Since I want it to play both in the US and in Europe I have decided to convert it to NTSC and do my final authoring in NTSC for all my project.

The reason is because PAL players in Europe will play NTSC DVDs just fine (as long as there is no region code) while NTSC players will not play PAL DVDs for the most part (mine just says, improper video format for this region) and choke on it. I have also read that PAL to NTSC conversion is better as there is more initial resolution to convert from, giving better ultimate result.

My problem, as so many other people's is the PAL to NTSC conversion. With interlaced footage it is not as easy as it seems. And de-interlacing loses half the resolution right off the bat, and while it might not matter that much with some old VHS8 footage, I would like to retain as much of the already poor quality as possible without introducing more artifacts.

I have searched previous posts and opinions on this matter and it seems like that some people swear by the simple solution of using Vegas to do the rendering and call it a day.

Some have used other pieces of free softwares and plugins to get better results, but it seems just way too complicated and the people in the first camp (just use Vegas and live with it) seem to claim that their results are just as good as the others.

Well I decided to do my own test.

I have captured some analog PAL footage from my old VHS8 camcorder using my ATI All-in-wonder Radeon 9600XT video card. One drawback of using this card is that it can only capture in MPEG2. Well it can capture in AVI standard as well, but there is no decent codec that I have found that will do a reasonable job with keeping file size manageable while keeping quality decent. The card does an OK job capturing into MPEG2 with 8Mbit VBR, it is nothing stellar, but it is definetely fine for some old analog footage. The only drawback is the need of another conversion, however that is not that big of a problem since I have to convert this footage from PAL to NTSC anyway.

So here I am with some captured PAL MPEG2 footage that I would like to have in NTSC DV codec so I can edit it and render into a final cut.

I have tried to use Vegas to just do the conversion, so I set up a new project with NTSC DV as the target and loaded in my PAL footage. Then I made screen captures of the preview window with all 3 de-interlace methods (none,blend,interpolate). Also, the original PAL footage was 720x576x25i with top frame first. I wanted NTSC DV with 720x480x29.7i with bottom frame first.

Here are the samples of my captures. The item in the picture is supposed to be a waterskier going towards the right at fairly high speed. This helped me to confirm the interlacing and which frame is top and which is bottom. I could confirm that the PAL footage I have captured from the analog source was indeed top frame first.

Original interlaced PAL footage

Vegas NTSC Iinterlaced with no de-interlacing

Vegas NTSC interlaced with blend de-interlacing

Vegas NTSC interlaced with interpolate de-interlacing:

The interesting thing is that all 3 de-interlacing methods produced identical results. They are all the same, so I am not sure how is that possible. It might be that de-interlacing is not applied to the preview screen, or I have scewed something up, but nevertheless they all look the same. If someone could confirm this, that would be great!

However, what is even worse than that, is that the interlacing is completely gone! You can see how the resampling totally ruined the footage, I bet that this video would experience some serious artifacting on TV. This is an extreme of interlacing (fast moving object) but it just looks like the interlacing or lack of de-interlacing completely ruined the footage. This is not acceptable.

If anyone has some other response, opinion, solution, feel free to add to it, I am all ears! I will try tonight and actually render the footage to NTSC with all 3 pre-sets and look back the final rendered NTSC DV footage to see if it's just a preview anomaly or not.

I have abandoned the option of using some open source freeware application with several other plug-ins or DLLs to install as a solution to my issue. It just didn't seem simple enough for my taste. I have decided to try using Canopus ProCoder and see what kind of results it would produce.

Here is the render after putting it through Canopus ProCoder

Since this is the only process that produced properly interlaced results that are actually interlaced and not ruined, I counted the lines from border to border, and they are in fact field swapped from the original, like they are supposed to be in NTSC DV footage, bottom field first. Needless to say, this is the only footage that is worth looking at.

Whoever said Vegas does a decent job of deinterlacing and resampling PAL to NTSC was wrong. It looks like poop compared to the Canopus result. I might be wrong and didn't have the rendering set up right, but unfortunately I think I am right on this one.

And the floor is open for suggestions!

Also, what will I want to render it as if I want to produce a DVD off of it? Does NTSC DVD use bottom or top frame first in interlace?

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Comments

GTakacs wrote on 6/22/2004, 8:09 AM

I DID read all your responses even if I didn't make a reply to each of them. This board is the worst by far of its kind, I don't mind the threaded reply system (I actually prefer it), but it is hard to find which response one has and hasn't read. I visit http://forums.audiworld.com/a4gen2 regularly, and I am familiar with this setup, but over there I can at least get e-mail notifications and the unread threaded replies are bold, so it's easier to sift through. This thread is not about board bashing though, so let's get back to the point at hand.

I will try the "reduce interlace flicker" switch and see what happens. I will compare output with that feature enabled. I am glad that you actually did something similar to my testing, even took it to a further extreme! My footage is real life footage and I just wanted to get answers to my concern.

So far you've been the only one who actually gave reasonable response, I apologize for not acknowledging it earlier. I was just too fed up with the herd metality of others with their "use DV not MPEG2" chant which as you and I both know have nothing to do with the interlace artifacts. I must also mention "erratic" who also contributed valuable reply.

It seems like most people still don't get what the issue I thought was at hand, just as I said in my last post I will try and play more with tweaking the settings on Vegas if it can give acceptable results. I will report back my findings.

Thanks again for all your responses, I just wish I could get my point through to others like it got through to you!

GTakacs wrote on 6/22/2004, 8:14 AM

I will try what farss recommended about reducing interlace flicker, I wonder if you have tried it yourself.

GTakacs wrote on 6/22/2004, 8:19 AM

I am not doing frame resizing besides the 576 to 480 horizontal line downsampling. That is what causes the artifacts. I will try the interface flicker removal feature and report back.

farss wrote on 6/22/2004, 3:12 PM

That's cool!
Didn't mean to come accross so hard, it just gets a tad frustrating at times and the thread was starting to look like it was going to go pear shaped if you know what I mean!
If I can find the time I might get some real world footage and run it through a S&W box for comparison. The only problem I have doing that is the station only runs digi decks and SDI so I need to be careful that we're actually seeing the difference in the conversion and not the quality of everything else.

SonyEPM wrote on 6/23/2004, 10:57 AM

Rendering with "BEST" quality will also help.

vitalforces wrote on 6/23/2004, 11:29 AM

GTakacs: There's also some inexpensive software developed by a Texas engineer which specifically is designed to convert PAL to NTSC without sacrificing half the field resolution. Here is his link:

http://www.dvfilm.com/atlantis/index.htm

erratic wrote on 7/7/2004, 11:33 AM

I was finally able to run an interesting PAL to NTSC conversion test:

1. Vegas
2. Vegas with Reduce Interlace Flicker (as suggested by farss)
3. ProCoder 2.0
4. Avisynth (frameserving to CCE)

Click here for a fast motion field from all four mpeg-2 files.
Conclusion: Reduce Interlace Flicker does indeed improve the conversion a lot in Vegas.

And by the way: the bitrate was 6000 CBR for all encoders and CCE did the fastest but worst job as far as mpeg-2 quality goes.

alfredsvideo wrote on 7/7/2004, 2:43 PM

There's a really simple solution to all this!! Let's face it. In the early days of television, America chose the wrong path and went NTSC. Any talk of coversion should be directed towards America abandoning a second rate standard and converting all their systems and equipment to PAL. Hope I haven't upset any of my American friends!!

farss wrote on 7/7/2004, 4:44 PM

Nah,
if you want a decent system SECAM is the way to go, even more res than PAL.

John_Cline wrote on 7/7/2004, 9:27 PM

NTSC was the first television standard and PAL was developed after NTSC. Even with the benefit of having the NTSC standard from which to work, PAL is not without its own technical shortcomings. SECAM was adapted from PAL and was an incremental improvement over the two earlier systems. Nevertheless, digital television is here and the whole PAL vs. NTSC vs. SECAM argument is rapidly becoming moot.

John

Grazie wrote on 7/7/2004, 10:19 PM

. . Well, I aint no pro media technician, but when ever I get something looking horrid I slap on the reduce interlace filcker [ RIF ] and most/all of what I had been getting is "ironed-out", a bit of Gausssian kills the rest . . . I don't do conversions, PAL<>NTSC or NTSC<>PAL, but when I use Pan/Crop on fast moving real life footage and I get nasty jaggers and artifacts, RIF does it for me . . and I ONLY capture in AVI . . .I don't use MPEG anything until I go out to presentation - yeah? I'm so much all over the place, that having at least the captured footage in something plain vanilla - meaning at least one variable fixed - keeps my workflow as simple as possible. I've got enough to contend with just making sure I haven't screed something else up - yeah?

Thanks for your detailed reports. I have learnt a tremendous amount - truly! . . It just again underlines, for this simple soul at least, the value of K.I.S.S. . . . . works for me .. .

Best regards - and thanks once again for the reports,

Grazie

farss wrote on 7/8/2004, 7:14 AM

John,
I wish it were becoming moot, correct me if I'm wrong as I don't know this for certain but I'd heard we were still being stuck with different frame rates for digital broadcasts in general and HiDef in particular.
Maybe I've missed something but hasn't the reason for keeping the field rate the same as the mains frequency long gone.

John_Cline wrote on 7/8/2004, 2:39 PM

Yes, there will be different frame rates for some time, probably due to the amount of existing footage that will be incorporated into DTV productions. However, HiDef TV's are in many way like multiscan VGA computer monitors, they are capable of different resolutions and frame rates. HiDef TV's are able to display pretty much any of the standard frame rates you throw at them.

John