PAL to NTSC conversion question

[Dakota Joe]

BTW: The tif sequences are from AE 7.0 PAL comps. Is there a good way to directly convert my PAL comps to NTSC QT video without having to render them first and then convert? Could it possibly as simple as bringing a PAL comp into an NTSC comp and rendering? Will this give me better movement quality than rendering the PALs and then re-rendering as NTSC?

[Filip Vandueren]

If the footage is 25P, then IMO, the best quality way is to interpret them as 24 FPS, rescale to fit in an NTSC comp also running at 24FPS, then render them out using pulldown to 30i.

You slow down the footage to 96%, so this may be not be the best solution for all kinds of movies, but it is the most ‘losless’ way of doing this.

Of course there are a few plugins that do this stuff, you will find many discussion about this subject in the archive.

[Dakota Joe]

Hey Filip,

Thanks for your response. I am aware of the method you mention. My concern is that my work is all very music-driven (no dialogue), and the action has to be sharply in sync with the audio. I surmised (perhaps wrongly?) that the method you suggest would throw my timing off enough to make a difference.

[Filip Vandueren]

Yeah, very much so, unless you also slow down the music…

BTW: of course if your comps are all pure animation stuff, with no actual PAL 25i video footage used, you’ll get great results by just dropping your comp into an NTSC comp and scaling to fit.

Anyway, search the archives for pal ntsc conversion. You’ll find different solutions.

I’ve also heard some video-veterans say that nothing comes close to dedicated hardware standards conversion boxes: if you have a lot of work to do, might be the cheapest and best way to find a facility that owns such transcoding equipment.