PAL to NTSC Conversion

[Chris Borjis]

I’m converting 8 hrs of PAL DV to NTSC DV.

Compressor does it really well, but make
sure you set the resizing and frame rate
conversion settings to the one just
one mark the best setting. The Best will
take 10x longer to convert and still look
exactly the same.

using the lower quality settings will cause
motion artifacts and aliasing.

[Uli Plank]

Is your PAL footage progressiv or interlaced?

If it’s progressive, you can go the 25 -> 24p route, which is fast and excellent quality.

BTW, in my experience Compressor is far slower than Nattress’ G Converter. Are you sure about your settings?

Regards,

uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Simon Hustings]

Hey Uli,
My PAL DV footage is Interlaced.
And I’m pretty confident about my settings. I followed the instructions word for word that came with the Nattress plugin. And I’ve researched on Lynda.com the way of converting PAL to NTSC using Compressor.
But Compressor still seems faster to me. It’s almost a real time process. The one minute clip was taking 1.07 to complete, whereas FCP was taking approx 3 minutes for the same clip. I know FCP is limited to using 4Gb of System RAM, is compressor limited the same way, or is having access to that 5th GB of RAM making all the difference?
Even though there is a render time difference, I’m not seeing anything visually to distinguish one from the other. I always heard Nattress Standards Converter was the way to go, but is this evidence of Compressor finally catching up in quality and surpassing it in speed?
Cheers,
Simon

[Uli Plank]

No, even with 6 GB RAM I don’t see Compressor being faster. Please check if the “Frame Controls” in Compressor are activated.

When you compare the footage, look carefully for fast pans or the like and check if the are not stuttering.

If that’s fine, you can go with Compressor.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Chris Borjis]

ideally for best results the compressor settings being just one setting below best for resizing and retiming, it should take 3x as long as your clip to convert.

a 1 hour clip will take 3 hours.

I have found any less than that on the quality settings yields unacceptable results.

[Mitch Sink]

[Simon Hustings] “And I’m pretty confident about my settings. I followed the instructions word for word that came with the Nattress plugin. And I’ve researched on Lynda.com the way of converting PAL to NTSC using Compressor.”

Hi Simon,

Would you mind posting the procedure/settings you used in Compressor? If you do that maybe Uli will be kind enough to verify (or not) your settings. If they are correct I would like to see how you did it.

Is the following a good method and does it require progressive input to get good results?:
mentioned in this Apple Forum Thread (btw you can change the audio duration without changing the pitch in Soundtrack):
https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6676526�

I frequently do PAL to NTSCfilm conversions using the “slow pal” method, which requires no temporal interpolation, and very simple spatial scaling if your source is progressive.

The penalty is a drop in speed/audio pitch because your 25fps original will play at 23.98fps. (So your 60 min PAL program runs about 62 min)

https://www.macworld.com/article/49306/2006/02/marchcreate.html

BTW the following comment was part of the same thread:

Question:
Have you tried Nattress Standard Conversion plugin for FCP?

Response:
Graeme is a genius and a fantastic guy, and I like to think we are friends with him. In fact, I believe i wrote the very first (or at least one of the first) reviews ever of his standards conversion plug-in for FCP. But a long time has passed since then… and the truth is that there’s no way it can compete with advanced motion vector stuff as in Compressor 2.x/3.x, Twixtor, AE Time warp and so on.

Since Compressor’s output is overall so good, and it fits so well in my DVD authoring workflow, I’d just need a way to tweak it when you get artifacts in cases like the one I described.

Thanks!

Mitch

[Simon Hustings]

Hey Mitch,
This was my workflow for interlaced DV PAL 4:3 > DV NTSC 4:3 using Compressor 3.02
1) I exported a self contained QT file from FCP, as DV PAL 48Khz (the timeline settings)
2) Created a job in Compressor, and selected DV NTSC from the Apple\Other Workflows\Advanced Format Conversion\Standard Definition presets folder.
3) I turned Frame Controls on, changed resize filter to Best, Rate conversion to Good and left the other settings alone.
4) Hit Submit and am waiting for the results. (As of writing, 3 hours to go)

I have also just finished rendering the doco using Nattress’ plugin, and I have to say it looks great. So far I have yet to see any artifacts visually, although it did take approx 5 hours to render. I’ll know more after Compressor finishes, but as of right now, I think they are both going to look about the same.

[Tim Lozada]

Has anyone experienced audio being out of sync after conversion? I followed the last set of instructions and the video looks fine but my audio is out of sync. did i miss a step?

[Ben De loenen]

Hi,

I am making a DVD project with about 3,5 hours of video PAL.
I filmed it 720p25 with the JVC GY-HD111 and exported, after editing it in Avid Media Composer to Uncompressed 8bit video.
For the PAL project I then encoded it using Compressor (last version) to Mpeg2 2passVBR average 2,0Mbit, max. 7,5Mbit.

Now I want to make an NTSC DVD, so I reencoded the uncompressed video using Compressor with the same settings as above, but famerate set to NTSC (29,97) and image size to 720×480 16:9. I enabled frame controls and set it all to the ones below the best.

I have an 8-core 2.26CHz MacPro with 6Gb RAM, but this render took ages. After a whole night, it still had to go through part of the next day. (3,5hours of video in total). I then made the DVD and when I look it back, the video movement is NOT smooth. I played it on a JVC PAL DVD player that plays NTSC DVDs usually perfectly.

Is this problem due to a setting, or is the movement with Compressor just not nicely converted?

Thanks

Ben

[Maray Sutti]

Hola Ben. Necesito hablar contigo urgente. Por favor comunícate pronto.
mi mail es: maraysutti@gmail.com