"Well I do have an ulterior motive."

Who hasn't?

Before anyone goes off on a pointless search for the ultimate solution lets look at a few facts.

NTSC will wlays look softer than PAL, all else being equal, it is lower resolution after all.
But NSTC does have higher temporal resolution due to the higher frame rate and there's no way to put back what PAL doesn't record.

So shooting PAL and converting to NSTC is never going to looks as good as shooting native NTSC. Sure you can get it closer than going the other way but still not perfect.

But to come close involves good downsampling which you'd think a trivial task but there's a big gattcha, PAL is interlaced, the word that strikes fear into anyone working with video. The only way to get a frame of full resolution PAL is to de-interlace and that in itself is no trivial task. SO we've got combined horrors to overcome. De-interlacing, frame rate conversion, resampling, changes in color sampling (if working in DV25) and the going back to interlaced.

I suspect that why the best boxes that do this in the broadcast world also do many other tricks, like video to film 'look' conversion. And they cost, big time. I don't know much about the finer points of the process but I do know for example that the old Leitch box did a lot of motion vector compensation for the de-interlacing phase, I do remember the manual saying that dodgy video (i.e. noisy) would throw the motion vector calcs for a six.

Seriously, if you want the job done right, take it to a post house or broadcaster that has a S&W Alchemist, those boxes sell for around $60K so $100 / hour to use one is dirt cheap.

Compred to them you can get a good conversion using Vegas, if you want the best possible job lay down a few bucks. At least if anyone questions your work you can honestly say it was done using an Alchemist and no one will question the quality.

Bob.

I hear what you're saying Bob.

Would the Alchemist do the MPEG2 encoding as well as the PAL>NTSC conversion? All in real time or faster? If they handed me an NTSC tape I'd have nothing to read it in.

Nick

Bob, thanks for finally nailing the coffin tightly shut with your that's-as-good-as-you're-gonna-get-with-Vegas. You want NTSC? Then shoot in NTSC first! Yup, kinda figured that one . . . Good to know, that, with my existing software, I can say that's it!

Would the Alchemist do the mpeg-2 encoding?

Nope.

And probably a post house would want either DigiBeta, BetaSP or DVCPro 50 and they'd give you back the same thing. A J30 which will do PAL or NTSC and would handle the ingest. So yes your costs could well be way more than the $100 / hour I'm talking about unless you can rent the gear.

However post houses are getting more and more used to handling video off HDD. If you've got one nearby talk to them. Some seem to be very with it.

I guess where I coming from is that PAL<->NTSC is done real time by broadcasters as a matter of course. Down here any live feed from any NTSC country hits our shores as NSTC, if we feed the USA you guys get PAL, that's how the arrangements work. I can see the slight loss of res from a NSTC feed, don't know how our PAL looks on your NTSC TVs, probably pretty good.

I've done a few corporate training videos for US distro, no budget so I just left it up to Vegas, sure not perfect but no one that's watching a video on how to clean windows is going to notice. My mates who work in broadcast put a crtical eye over the results are were pretty impressed, I think I found more issues than they did to be honest, there's more motion blur than there should be but without very complex motion compensation that's to be expected.

Bob.

Thanks again Bob.

By the way, anyone interested in following my rivetting TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress problem can read about it here.

Nick

Nick? Would you post your pre-PAL and post-NTSC example? I've seen your AVI - fishes - where are you up to now?

Nick,

I downloaded your avi footage and loaded it up into my old TMPGEnc version, and it came up as 704x576. Don't know why you aren't getting full resolution, is it a known bug?

Dave

edited:
I just followed your latest link and saw the additional info. Maybe your DirectX install is corrupt?
Go to Programs\Accessories\System Tools\System Information. Then on the Tools menu, select DirectX Diagnostic Tool and run through all of the tests.

Thanks Dave, that's what I was suspecting too. But the DirectX checks are all OK. I tried a DirectX reinstall and it did add on some new components but not the core stuff. Then I forced a DirectX reinstall by editing the version number in the registry. But still the problem persists and the DirectX diagnostic checks are OK.

So I'm sorry Grazie but I'm in limbo at the moment until I can get TMPGEnc working. Waiting on support now. I feel it might require a full Windows reinstall which I don't have time for at the moment. Will post a converted MPEG2 file (+ original PAL) when I eventually have one.

Nick

My TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress problem is fixed now thanks to TMPGEnc support. I had to open one of my DV-AVI files in Windows Media Player 6.4 then go file > properties > advanced > DV Video Decoder > properties > full. Mine had been set to "half" size. Full story here.

Now then Grazie, what a can of worms you've opened up here! As a result of all this I've been around the houses again and tested all manner of PAL > NTSC conversions over the last 2 days.

I tested about a minute of footage with lots of sideways movement. I had heavy bold white generated text moving around the screen. At one point there were silhouetted fish swimming very rapidly across the screen. I converted to NTSC and encoded to MPEG2 so I could test a DVD on my TV. Here are 3 of the results:

1. TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress

TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress direct to NTSC MPEG2 from the original PAL DV AVI. The result is nice and sharp. In this case the bold text and action step across the screen rather than totally smooth and the fast swimming fish are pretty sharp. It's about 5 steps per second as you would expect as the extra frames are added to go from 25fps to 29.97. It's better than the old TMPGEnc Plus 2.5.

2. Procoder

Procoder 2 direct to NTSC MPEG2 from the original PAL DV AVI. Not bad but some "shimmer/jitter" and softer than method 1, but not quite so steppy. Acceptable though, which is just as well as I've been using this method for years.

3. Vegas

Had "Gaussian" and "blend fields" set in project properties. In the custom template set video rendering quality to "best" and field order set to "lower field first". Then encoded to MPEG2 using built-in Main Concept encoder and also externally (via an NTSC DV AVI file) using CCE Basic (with luminance set to "0 to 255") and Procoder 2. The result is generally similar to method 2 (Procoder conversion) but not so obviously steppy as TMPGEnc Xpress. CCE was by far the fastest of the 3 encoders. I think Main Concept is slightly softer than the other 2 encoders but there's not much in it. Tests I've done previously showed it to be softer anyway for straight PAL MPEG2 conversion.

Notes:

1. I have only previewed this stuff on my multi-system gear here. i.e. 2 x DVD players (that play both PAL and NTSC) and 2 x PAL TVs that also display NTSC. Result may look different on native NTSC gear (see below).

2. All tests were done with best quality options available (e.g. best, mastering quality).

3. I used 9Mbps for all the MPEG2 files.

4. I could not see any difference by setting "reduce interlace flicker" in the video event properties. I might try this again though.

5. Setting "interpolate fields" gave a worse result than "blend fields" in the project properties. Blurry and soft and a touch of "comb" effect next to the text.

6. Trying Mike Crash's old "smart deinterlace" filter instead of "blend fields" produced artefacts around the text that can be seen when the video is paused.

7. Trying the more recent smart deinterlace filter (2.8 I think) via the Wax plugin gave a result no better than Vegas' native "blend fields".

8. Procoder 1.5 was no better than Procoder 2 for the PAL > NTSC conversion. Some on the Canopus forums said it was.

9. I understand that a S&W Alchemist box or whatever will do better but for most projects I do I just can't afford that. And I'm in the wrong country to get a quality job done. So software solutions are very important to me.

If I built a mini-DVD folder with a 3 or 4-pick menu of my results and uploaded it to yousendit.com, would anyone be interested in downloading it and burning it to DVD to test? It would be something like 200 Mb to download. It would be great to get further opinions and see how these looked on a native NTSC DVD player/TV.

Nick

Edit Note: This post was heavily changed 2 hours after the original post after I realised my silly mistake (see later post)

Nick? I am not worthy to write - "I am not worthy"!!

I'm in complete awe of your persistence and not a little jealous of your abilities and understanding of matters, that, like a wide-eyed kid viewing toys in a toyshop, I can only gawp at from the outside barely seeing the shimmering "truth" that lies beyond.

Believe me when I say that whatever "container" these creatures were hiding in, I had no idea what it would reveal.

Thank you for doing this amazing matrix of tests.

Nick,
thanks for putting so much time and effort into those tests however I do have one reservation about them. It's hard to determine where the issues that you've noticed are coming from. The PAL->NTSC conversion or the MPEG-2 encode.

That aside though it mostly sounds like the issues with the PAL->NTSC conversion are due coming from the quality of the de-interlacing algorithms. I'm told that Twixtor running under AE does a very good job for a software only solution, but the price is kind of steep and reading through a tutorial over on COW a long time ago configuring it for the best results was not a simple task.

From what I can gather of the 'magic' the Alchemist weaves there's some mind numbing amounts of calcs done with motion estimation for de-interlacing, the stuff that earns mutliple PhDs. They certainly look many frames before and after the current frame, calculate vectors for motion and accelaration, do estimations etc. A software only solution would probably take years to render!

Certainly my tests were only with locked down shots and minor amounts of motion, good enough for what it was and the client wasn't laying down many dollars. Bear in mind I started doing this back in the V4 days when finding any NLE that'd do standards conversion was quite a find.

But anyway, if anyone does have work worthy of the cost of running it through an Alchemist, there's plenty of post houses within a KM or two of me that I can get quotes for and organise the work on anyones behalf. I can usually find a contact that we know on a first name basis so you can be assured of getting good work at a good price, just be warned even mates rates on this stuff isn't cheap. My email is in my profile.

Bob.

Oops, I've substantially edited my above post after I realised why the generated media bold text originally came out so smooth in the Vegas conversion. Because the NTSC AVI was written from the raw timeline so the generated media bold text was not actually converted from PAL to NTSC, only the background footage was. I've since redone it by rendering the timeline (including generated media) to PAL first and then plugging that AVI into a new project for the NTSC conversion. The smoothness of the moving text is nowhere near as good as a result. Sorry for misleading you.

Thanks for the Alchemist offer Bob. I will remember that for future projects.

Nick

Hi Nick. I've just done a comparison of the same 3 programs, but I didn't convert to MPEG, just a straight transcoding from PAL DV to NTSC DV.

I think my results are quite similar to yours. TMPEG 4 Express was the sharpest, but the motion was not that smooth and had a jittery feel to it. PC2 was a bit softer but smoother, with occasional sticking of the odd frame. Vegas was similar to PC2, but maybe slightly more jerky (not much in it). I'm also using a multi-system TV for the comparison, so there could be some variations expected with real NTSC equipment.

Given that this quality is built in to Vegas without having to buy plug-ins, it's a very good result for Vegas.

Richard

"Given that this quality is built in to Vegas without having to buy plug-ins, it's a very good result for Vegas."

So, Richard, I appear to have made the best choice of workflow, from within Vegas? Pure luck on my part, and a lack of "other" software.

Hi Grazie. Yes, you jammy dodger! :)

Richard