Compressor 3 – PAL to NTSC

[Carsten Orlt]

done it many times w. compressor 2.
just choose one of the NTSC formats from the presets (including DVD formats).
important! you have to change the following as the presets don’t have frame control enabled (at least in vers2)
you have to use frame controls and set the resize to ‘better’ and rate conversion to ‘better’ too (‘good’ for rate conversion is not good enough 🙂
no need to go to any higher settings.

This format conversion is good enough for any kind of screeners, but if it is for broadcast I would still recommend to go to a post house to make the conversion through some high end box. But I might be wrong and the quality could be good enough through compressor, i just don’t want to go throuhg the hassle to master in ntsc…..

[Gary Adcock]

[cofe] “This format conversion is good enough for any kind of screeners, but if it is for broadcast I would still recommend to go to a post house to make the conversion through some high end box”

Agreed.

with Compressor 3 the quality of this type of conversion seems to depend on what graphics card is handling the GPU processing.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Marcus Van bavel]

And you might also look at DVFilm Atlantis https://dvfilm.com/atlantis which is slower, but uses motion analysis and is broadcast quality regardless of what computer you’re running it on.

[Antonio Atzei]

Marcus
I believe I saw something similar on my mac! I have been trying for weeks to get this sd dvd pal to look as I want, but it seams impossible. If I view the project on the dvd sp timeline before I burn it, I can see that it looks like in the timeline of fcp. I then realised that in the track panel it shows the dimentions of a ntsc 720 x 480 screen not pal,and also it shows an i in the end……….. I thought I changed all before in compressor. I work only in pal though, so is by aby chance that a hopeless gy like me can set the mac to produce a sd dvd that is in the pal format and reproduces the image as I want?
Txs for any suggestions
Rds.
Antonio

BABALOTTI PRODUCTIONS
SYDNEY
POWER MAC G5 QUAD SYSTEM
5.5GB RAM
1 TB OF MEMORY.FCStudio

[Gary Adcock]

[Marcus van Bavel] “nd you might also look at DVFilm Atlantis https://dvfilm.com/atlantis which is slower, but uses motion analysis and is broadcast quality regardless of what computer you’re running it on.”

Only in SD for mac users, and only 1080 for HD users on windows so not really that useful for many of us.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Marcus Van bavel]

[gary adcock] “Only in SD for mac users, and only 1080 for HD users on windows so not really that useful for many of us.”

I don’t get this statement. If you have a 50iHD project, for example, the first step is to make a 50i SD PAL export which you will need anyway for PAL broadcast. FCP does a pretty good job of that. Then use Atlantis to make the NTSC version. Is that not useful? Maybe you would like to do it differently. But it is still useful– right?

The Windows version does hd 50i/60i and SD PAL/NTSC both. Why is that not useful?

[Tom Bridges]

[Marcus van Bavel] “and is broadcast quality regardless of what computer you’re running it on.”

When you say broadcast quality, what are you comparing it to? Does it look as good as an Alchemist? Compressor also uses motion analysis, of course, but we find it can often produce artefacts. That’s why we’ll send broadcast standards conversions out-of-house. Are you saying that we wouldn’t need to do that with your product?

Thanks,

Tom

[Gary Adcock]

[Marcus van Bavel] “The Windows version does hd 50i/60i and SD PAL/NTSC both. Why is that not useful?”

marcus

this is the FCP forum- so I assume that most are posting video on their Mac FCP systems, and Raylight on a Mac only supports the NTSC to PAL conversions in the SD world.

You need to work in windows to to 1080i conversions, and 720, a progressive format is not supported at all.

I would call that limiting its use for many in this forum.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Marcus Van bavel]

[Tom Bridges] “When you say broadcast quality, what are you comparing it to? Does it look as good as an Alchemist? Compressor also uses motion analysis, of course, but we find it can often produce artefacts. That’s why we’ll send broadcast standards conversions out-of-house. Are you saying that we wouldn’t need to do that with your product?”

Yes, I’m comparing it to Alchemist. There is a free trial version of Atlantis on the DVFilm website so you can make a comparision yourself.

Atlantis uses a unique method where it first converts interlaced PAL to 25P, using motion-sensitive (or “smart”) deinterlacing, then applies a 3:2-like pulldown to print 25 frames over 59.94 fields per second NTSC.

For NTSC to PAL it first either removes pulldown (for film-originated or 24P-shot material) or deinterlaces 60i to 24P, then speeds up 4% to 25P.

The motion detector is a motion-scalar type (senses the presense of motion but not the direction or amount travelled) vs motion vector, and so is less easily fooled by erratic or unpredictable moves or repetitive patterns. The main drawback of the Atlantis method is it relies on normal shutter speeds (1/60th to 1/50th sec) so does not work well with high-shutter speed material.

[Tom Bridges]

Thanks for that. I’ll check it out …