best 24p to pal DVD solution?

[Samuel Frazier]

Thanks for the response! Unfortunately, now I’m a little confused. My understanding was that 24p DVDs should play back on PAL DVD players, only 4.096% faster. So my movie will have a slightly shorter running time when played in PAL areas than in NTSC areas. So, my whole plan for PAL was to take the faster video as is and adjust only the pitch (not the duration) of the audio. This way the audio and video should still always be in sync, only in PAL areas the extra speed will make the lowered pitch of the audio sound normal. Does that make sense? If so, will it work, or are there better ways to do this?
Thanks again for the help!

[Graeme Nattress]

Use the cinema tools conform option to take your 24p to 25.00fps. Do this on a copy of the movie. Use FCP to scale it up to PAL dimensions. Sounds like you know how to deal with the audio. Match that up and you’re laughing.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Samuel Frazier]

Thank you both for the help! I really appreciate it. My understanding though, and I could be wrong, is that if you make a PAL version of your video then you won’t need to do anything to your audio. I thought the 4.096% speed up only comes when you put in a 24p NTSC DVD into a PAL DVD player, otherwise the length of the movie should be unaffected. So, as I understood it, if I make a PAL formatted DVD then it shouldn’t be sped up and I wouldn’t need to make any adjustment to the audio. Am I wrong about this?
I know that at least some PAL DVD players play 24p NTSC DVDs as I brought a few I made a couple of years ago to Ireland. They played in my friend’s DVD player fine, but that was the extent of the test.

[Samuel Frazier]

Thanks for the response, Dave. This does get confusing and I had to read through your post a few times and think about it a good bit. What I’ve come up with is this:

1- Conforming 24p to 25p reduces the running time. I didn’t know that. So, for the audio to match this would would have to shorten it. But, that sounds like a fairly complecated proceedure, relying upon a lot of formulas, and I would think sync would be hard to maintain. I’ve done this kind of thing before (when I sped up a movie to make a 5min limit) and found STP did not keep the sync as well as my DAW, Sony Vegas. Also, this is actually a different proceedure than what I had mentioned before as now you’re shortening the audio and want to maintain the pitch, whereas the method I was describing was to keep the same length but alter the pitch. More on that later.

2- What I was talking about doing was just taking an ordinary 24p NTSC DVD and playing it on a PAL DVD player. My understanding is that the PAL DVD player will play back 24p NTSC DVDs, only 4.096% faster. So the whole movie is 4.096% shorter on PAL. This applies to both the video and the audio, which leads to the audio sounding a tiny bit like Alvin and the Chipmunks. My solution to this problem was that complecated formula where the duration of the audio doesn’t change but the pitch is lowered 4.096%. That way when the PAL DVD player speeds it up by 4.096%, it will be back to its normal pitch.

3- All of this was a LOT easier in my old editor, Vegas. If you want to make a PAL DVD, you could actually encode it either as 25p or 50i MPEG2 straight from whatever timeline you had. The PAL version would be the same length as the NTSC, so you could use the same audio. Results were very clean.

4- I just would think there’d be an easier way to do this in FCP. Mr Nattress, I know you’re busy with all things RED, but it sure would be a nice addition to your Standards Converter. Just a thought.

[Carsten Kurpanek]

I think I understand what you mean. You are basically not converting the NTSC footage to PAL, instead you are creating an 23,976 NTSC DVD with a 4,096% “lower” (but not slower) audio track. When you put this DVD in a PAL DVD player, the DVD player compensates for the 23,976 frame rate by speeding it up to 25 fps (= 4,096%), thus your NTSC disc is playing 4,096% faster than on a NTSC DVD player, but the pitch of the audio track (although speed up by the player) has the original pitch.

Basically you create two NTSC DVDs. One NTSC DVD for a NTSC DVD player with correct speed and sound. And one NTSC DVD with a lower pitched audio track which will play back on an PAL DVD player faster (video and audio), will look faster then the DVD image on the NTSC DVD player but will sound the same.

This is of course not a conversion from NTSC to PAL. You could also slow down both video and audio (pitch and lenght!) by 4,096% and burn it as a 23,976 NTSC DVD. If you’d play that on a PAL DVD player both audio and video would in theory playing in the same speed as the original movie on a NTSC DVD player. I highly doubt it will look good, though…

If you want a real PAL DVD you have to do what the others suggest. Conform the foottage to 25p and make up for the increase in speed by increasing the audio by 4,096%. If you are bothered by the higher sounding audio you can now adjust the pitch without changing the tracks length to its original pitch. Burn this on a 25p PAL DVD and you have real PAL which will definitely play on every player, not a NTSC DVD pretending to look like a PAL DVD.

I am actually trying to understand this whole process myself right now. I shot a short film with the Canon XL-H1 in 1080p24 and would like to have a DigiBeta in NTSC and PAL. A post house wanted to charge me 500 Euros to convert my HDV 24p footage to SD 25p PAL. I think I finally understand how to do it myself, using Cinema Tools and an audio editor.

[Jayo2007]

Hi. I have an edited music video project in 24fps I need to deliver on PAL DVD. I understand the speedup to PAL will change the pitch of the song and play it about 4% faster.. Is there a way for me to keep the original audiofile? Or is the Conform 24 to 25 in Cinematools the cleanest way to go?

[Gary Adcock]

[jayo2007] “I understand the speedup to PAL will change the pitch of the song and play it about 4% faster.. Is there a way for me to keep the original audiofile? Or is the Conform 24 to 25 in Cinematools the cleanest way to go? “

reconnect the original audio after you covert / conform the footage in CT.

Audio does not have frame rates – Aiff files do not have frames. Audio( without video) is recorded as minutes + seconds or Feet + inches.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Jayo2007]

Ok. But what about the duration of the conformed video Vs. original audio? Will it match up? I’ve read about people changing speed and pitch of the soundtrack to match it up. I only have a song that’s 3min44sec long so if the conformed footage will match up with my original audiofile I’m golden. Will it?