UK and North American compatibility

JohnJ wrote on 10/29/2014, 8:10 AM

Hello,
I record and render my video in HD 1080-50i (1920x1080, 25fps). A friend in North America has sent me some video which I think was shot in HD 1080-60i (1920x1080 29,970fps). It was sent to me on an SD card (class 10) and the properties are AVCHD Video(.MTS) for some of the shots and MP4 Video(.MP4) for the rest.
As I wish to include the North American video in my project I converted it to HD 1080-50i (1920x1080, 25fps) as for the entire project On burning a bluray I find that the converted North American sections are jerky.
The subject of the video is steam railroading so there is quite a bit of movement accross the screen.
Can anyone suggest a solution please?

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/29/2014, 8:30 AM

Don't convert the video to PAL. Edit it in a project set up for NTSC.

An NTSC BluRay should look great on both an American and Eurorpean disc player (most of which include NTSC compatibility).

JohnJ wrote on 10/29/2014, 10:19 AM

Hi,
It does look fine on my disc player, but how do I edit into my UK standard project?
Thanks

musicvid10 wrote on 10/29/2014, 11:05 AM

HD NTSC should play fine in the UK.
You're not using it on analog teevees, correct?

OldSmoke wrote on 10/29/2014, 11:38 AM

JohnJ

have you tried first changing the frame rate of the NTSC footage from 60i to 60p and then back to 50p or 50i? It may help.

Edit: As John well pointed out, be careful with the resample feature of Vegas. I would start with bringing all 60i into Vegas, enable smart resample, set project properties to progressive, double NTSC (59.94) and interlace method to interpolate -> render it out to 60p intermediate, use XAVC-S for that. Bring the new 60p into Vegas and render it out as 50i with resample set to smart resample. (you could make one more extra step and render it to 50p)

You might get away with bringing the 60p footage into a 50i project and rendering the whole project to 50i. Just make sure smart resample is OFF for all 60p events.

johnmeyer wrote on 10/29/2014, 11:58 AM

It sounds like you want to include both PAL and NTSC material in the same video. If so, some of the suggestions so far of merely encoding to NTSC and playing on your dual standards players will not work. Instead, you have to convert the NTSC footage to PAL.

You can convert in Vegas. If you search these forums for PAL and NTSC, but restrict it to only searching the subject line, you'll get lots of information on how to do this. If you do it in Vegas, make sure you set Deinterlace Method in the Project Properties to Interpolate, and make sure that Resample for all of your video is set to Smart. Do not set it to None or your video will be jerky.

It is tough to get good results when converting video from NTSC to PAL (or vice versa), but if quality is important, then Nick Hope provided the "ultimate" method in a post a few years ago:

Perfectionists' PAL<=>NTSC Conversion

NickHope wrote on 10/29/2014, 1:52 PM

>> If so, some of the suggestions so far of merely encoding to NTSC and playing on your dual standards players will not work. Instead, you have to convert the NTSC footage to PAL. <<

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "will not work" John. Could you expand?

As far as I understand it (the last time I researched it, a good while ago), both 50i and 60i Blu-rays play fine on UK Blu-ray players and TVs. But 50i won't play fine on many USA players.

So if he wants to send a copy to his friend in North America then his 50i stuff will have to be upsampled to 60i. If it's for UK-only playback I would say the decision of whether to encode to 50i or 60i should depend on what proportion of the footage is 50i or 60i. i.e. Resample the least. If it's close to 50/50 then downsample the 60i stuff to 50i (theoretically better than upsampling 50i to 60i).

johnmeyer wrote on 10/29/2014, 5:48 PM

I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "will not work" John. Could you expand?Well, maybe it is I who is confused.

I was assuming that he wanted to inter-cut, in the same project, between both PAL and NTSC source material. So, on the same timeline, he is going to have both 50i and 60i. However, when it comes time to render and create a DVD, he has to choose PAL or NTSC. At that point, he can choose either 50i or 60i if his audience is outside the USA because most players sold outside our country can handle either. However, whichever one he chooses, either the PAL or NTSC footage on the timeline will have to be converted to the format he chooses for his DVD.

If he follows my initial advice and lets Vegas handle this conversion, using its internal resampling algorithms, he should get a reasonable result, although the footage that has to be converted to conform to the output cadence will probably look a little soft because of the interpolated frames.

I then provided the link to your work with QTGMC because AFIK, that is still the gold standard for what can be done with software tools available to us mere mortals when doing PAL<==>NTSC conversions.

JohnJ wrote on 11/9/2014, 6:42 AM