Shooting in Pal for NTSC?????

Sr_C wrote on 10/4/2002, 8:10 PM
I stopped by a local pro video/film shop to pick up some 5 min VHS tapes and happened to get in a conversation with the guy in charge of rentals. I originally asked him if he was planning on getting and renting the new Panasonic 24P camera (I want to try it out to see if all the hype is just that....hype) He said he wasn't planning on it and then he suggested something interesting. He said that if I wanted the film effect, to shoot in pal (25fps) and transfer over to NTSC. He said that doing this would also give me 100 more lines of resolution for an all around better effect. I will be the first to admit that I know absolutly nothing about Pal. In fact, the only thing that I know about Pal is that I use NTSC. Anyways, he sparked my curiousity as I have never heard of doing this before. Here are my questions:

Has anyone done this?
What processes are involved?
Can the transfer from Pal footage to NTSC edit all be done in VV3?


I doubt that I would ever go this route as if I find a need for a 24P look then I just follow the Sonic Foundry tutorial for converting. He just really took me off guard with such a suggestion. Is what he talking about a common practice or is this guy just odd? -Shon

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 10/5/2002, 9:36 PM
I only have a moment to respond to this message. No, this won't work well at all. You won't get an extra 100 lines of resolution, and conversion from PAL to NTSC is very difficult to do correctly. It not just a matter of converting frame rates. And finally, Vegas will not for the conversion for you. Personally, I don't think the guy wasn't quite certain what he was talking about.

John

JumboTech wrote on 10/6/2002, 9:25 AM
Well, Vegas can do the conversion for you but it took about 17 hours to resample 1 hour and fifteen minutes and I don't think that included the encoding to MPEG 2 that I did afterwards. What you might call a bit of a pain in the backside.

Al
SonyDennis wrote on 10/7/2002, 9:58 AM
There is some truth to this. If you shot 25p (note the p) in PAL, and brought it into Vegas, and rendered 60i NTSC, it would have a similar cadence to 24p.

If you shot 50i, there would be no film cadence look, and would be a waste of time.

///d@
ozdf wrote on 10/7/2002, 1:51 PM
While I have never done this, my understanding is that this is what one would want to do if you plan to transfer your video to film. As PAL offers higher resolution than NTSC and a very similar frame speed (24 vs 25 fps). It might also be argued that video shot on PAL then transferred to HDTV would look better than footage shot with the same NTSC camera, again because of the higher resolution.

If you want a film feel with NTSC the simplest thing to do is shoot in progressive scan (non-interlaced) or frame mode. That's what I do.

Dan
SonyDennis wrote on 10/7/2002, 11:05 PM
Depending on how the film transfer is done, it might be better to have had 60 fields (albiet half-height resolution) than 30 or 25 full frames. I *know* I can get 24 frames per second from 60i by using 2 out of every 5 fields, and I can improve the result using adaptive deinterlacing to get back resolution in non-moving areas. 25p is not so bad, provided you're willing to change the length of your feature by 4%. But 30p is pretty tough, you can't just toss every 5th frame, it's going to look pretty choppy. Of course, I've never done a film transfer, you'd be best off talking to someone who has before you start shooting or even purchasing your camera. By the way, that's one of the reasons Panasonic's new 24p camera is getting a lot of buzz, it makes a later video-to-film transfer easy (among other reasons).
///d@