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Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy Workflow NTSC to PAL

  • Workflow NTSC to PAL

    Posted by Eric Hungerford on July 16, 2010 at 6:12 pm

    Have a multimedia project where the final output will be HD PAL MPEG2, but my source material will be approx 100 hours of a combination of NTSC Beta, Digibeta, MiniDV, HD 23.98 and HD 59.94. My initial thought is to ingest and cut the material in it’s native format, and upon picture lock convert the select source tapes to PAL via hardware then re-ingest/reconstruct all the media. I feel it would be cost prohibitive to convert all the source material via hardware ahead of time. The only other option I see is to convert to PAL via compressor after the media is ingested, but I have heard that software conversion leaves much to be desired for quality.

    Thoughts rom anyone who has done this type of project before would be most appreciated.

    – Eric

    Neil Sadwelkar replied 16 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Neil Sadwelkar

    July 17, 2010 at 6:39 am

    I’ve done PAL to NTSC with Compressor, and with a careful application of settings it turns out pretty good. 24fps to NTSC does better.

    So, if at all it is an option, you could take your final edited NTSC timeline, export it out as an NTSC Quicktime with audio. Then use compressor to convert that to 23.98 fps Quicktime. At this stage scale the movie to 720×576 which is the PAL frame size.

    After that use CinemaTools to conform that 23.98 movie (with audio) to 25fps. Sound (and picture) will run 4% faster but in PAL countries we are used to film (24fps) material coming out as 25fps PAL at 4% faster speed. This method has less motion artifacts overall than the 29.97 to 25 conversion.

    ———————————–
    Neil Sadwelkar
    neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
    twitter: fcpguru
    FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
    Mumbai India

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