Does 'best' make a noticeable difference when converting from NTSC to PAL? Will it help minimise the jerkiness on horizontal pans?

I just did a conversion at 'good' quality and it took ages. If there's generally a noticeable difference then I'm prepared to re-render. If not, I won't. I realize this is somewhat subjective, but I'd appreciate an indication of what to expect / under what conditions the difference can be seen.

Thanks,

Mark

Thanks for taking the time to reply,
I was pretty sure it was transcoded otherwise the VCR and monitor wouldn't have accepted the signal. What worried me though was I'd never seen the ability to do this touted as a feature. Mostly we get stuff thats going out on VHS anyway so it doesn't have to be over the top perfect, but being able to render out both a PAL and NTSC version or to bring in some NTSC video from overseas and add some local PAL shots is pretty convenient.

And to think the first converter I saw was a NTSC monitor with a PAL camera parked in front of it!

I think they still might do that, although you don't hear the "analog coversion" and the "digital conversion" much anymore. My solution, at least for screeners, is to burn a VCD or SVCD because computers don't really see NTSC/PAL and beyond that now APEX has a very inexpesive DVD/VCD/SVCD player that will play either PAL or NTSC. My mother sends over PAL DVD's and I pop them into the Apex AD-1500 and the covert into an NTSC signal perfectly for playback here in the US.

My point is that there are options now that weren't options 20 years ago or more. Cost of a CD burner and blank media these days is so cheap the VCD/SVCD option is probably the cheapest way to go. Cost of the Apex stuff is well under $100 US so set top playback can be had without expensive multi format monitors and so on.

Just about every DVD player will also play either and most of the VHS VCRs sold here will play out a "PAL" feed into our PAL TVs from a NTSC tape. However they are not doing a frame rate conversion, basically they just shift the colour burst enough so the TV can cope. You cannot take the signal coming out of the VCR and record it onto another PAL VCR.
Thats not to say theres anything wrong with what you are doing, I use this kind of solution all the time myself.

Doing a proper conversion involves altering the frame rate and remapping pixels. Its much the same as going from film to NTSC. Going back from NTSC to PAL at 25fps involves mergering frames as best I can see. To do this at broadcast quality in realtime means a very expensive box (about $US50K).

The analogue (air gap) converters are long gone, the first digital converters took up 4 6 foot racks, it takes up 1 RU now but still costs a bundle.

I just now saw you had responded to what I had said - It is still not the norm that NTSC DVD players and VCR's output PAL, at least not in the US. I know over in Europe a lot of DVD players have switches on the back to go from NTSC > PAL, but here NTSC is just that - no switch in the back, NTSC output only. The APEX DVD player I mentioned has an auto detect for PAL/NTSC in it but also has a button to push for PAL/NTSC output (As opposed to conversion) so in theory I could also run the output through a PAL TV or a PAL VCR. As this is an NTSC model I do not know how the PAL model looks but I would thik the same. It cost maybe 50 - 60 Dollars US and does the coversions extremly nice. I compare this to an Aiwa Multi-Standard "digital" VCR that was purchased for about 1,000 Dollars US about 6 years ago and the output was crap compared to what the Apex DVD puts out. I guess the point to my post before was that if you needed to send out a PAL screener to the US or Japan you could burn a VCD/SVCD to look at on a computer, it might save the pre-render coversion from PAL > NTSC (or vice versa). Or if the person you were sending it to had a DVD player such as the Apex AD-1500 they could watch it on a TV, or even dub it out to video, as it is and not have to view on a computer.

I don't know of any NTSC VCR that allows you to play back a PAL video to be able to do what you talk about. (Unless you are talking about a Multi-Standard VCR)

Filmy,
About the Apex-1500:
Amazon.com says: "Compatible with NTSC and PAL televisions and discs (as long as the discs are Region 1)"
Is there some un-documented setting to switch to different regions?