• Adobe Encore DVD

  Help in understanding NTSC and PAL standars for my project

  Posted by Costas Damianou on September 17, 2006 at 9:21 pm

  Hi Guys

  I am not sure if the title i gave gives my query justice.

  I know the differences between NTSC and PAL, but here is my question.

  I am based in the United Kingdom so my footage will be in Pal. My final production will be NTSC so it can be viewed in America.

  When you start a new project in Encore DVD you are asked to choose Television staandard for this project. Do i choose Pal or NTSC?

  Also
  If i was to purchase stock motion backgrounds, do these need to be in the format of the final production IE in my case NTSC?

  Your help is much appreciated.

  Costas

  Erik Pontius replied 19 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Neil Wilkes

  September 18, 2006 at 9:42 am

  If you need this to work in the USA< then you need to select the NTSC standard, it's that simple. Most UK PAL players these days will also play an NTSC disc, either natively or as PAL-60, but most US NTSC players will simply refuse to read PAL discs at all. Your Video files will need to be in NTSC format, as will your menus. Video has to be at 720 x 480, and if your existing footage is all PAL and you have a copy of Premiere Pro about the easiest way to do thechange is to create a new NTSC project in PPro, import your PAL footage and then hit the ENTER key as soon as it is imported. This will turn it into NTSC for you, and you can then export from PPro either as NTSC DV AVI, or as NTSC MPEG-2 (Via the Adobe Media Encoder). My preference is to use AVI files in Encore, as this allows not only greater flexibility in placing chapter markers (Encore will transcode for you, and will automatically place a GOP header at each chapter marker. With MPEG-2 footage, Encore can only place Chapter Markers at GOP headers) Additionally, using AVI files will allow Encore to automatically set the best possible bitrate for your project when transcoding.
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  Costas Damianou

  September 24, 2006 at 11:01 am

  Thanks for your reply. So if im going to convert to Avi to trasfer to encore, it dosnt matter if my project is is Pal and not NTSC, even though my final outcome will be NTSC.

  Thanks
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  Erik Pontius

  October 1, 2006 at 2:57 am

  Using an NLE like Premiere to do standards conversion, will result in a pretty poor quality result. Premiere does not handle the differences between frame size, frame rates and other differences between the television standards very intelligently…doubling or skipping frames, etc.. causing strobing, jittery video and other problems.
  Your best bet on a budget is to purchase a good encoder that knows how to properly do standards conversion. I use Conopus Procoder, which also includes an export plugin for Premiere, it’s probably one of the best encoders for standards conversions…and darn useful for many other tasks.

  Erik

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