NTSC conversion

[electricpig]

I'm sitting pretty in PAL land, and need to convert my Little Girl Giant film to NTSC for circusremedy.com who've asked to use it for kids hospitals, refugee camps etc., which is a great honour.

I've got a beautifull 29.97 from 25 conversion nailed down using Shake's Adaptive retiming, giving me a beautifully smooth version, with none of the jarring stepping that normally happens with a simple pulldown/pullup frame dupe method.

My question involves the ratios I need for an anamorphic and standard 4:3 version from my 16:9 version for NTSC.

For a PAL anamorphic I usually just do a straight resize from 1920x1080 down to 720x576 and save out as DVCPro50 16:9 ratio, accepting there's a slight aspect ratio difference.

For the NTSC I realise this difference will be too great converting to 720x480, so should I be putting black letterbox top and bottom and then making an anamorphic version?

Just wanting advice from you NTSC'ers out there.


mike.c

[Barry_Green]

If they want it on DVD, you need to go to 720x480 at a 1.2:1 pixel aspect ratio. That's what our 16:9 DVDs get mastered at.

All our HD-to-DVD downconversions go from 1920x1080 to 720x480, so I don't know why you'd think that'd be too great a difference?

[electricpig]

Thanks Barry. Just totally unfamiliar with NTSC rules, and wanting to make sure before I mastered something, sent it and found it was wrong.

I'm aware that my PAL anamorphic versions are slightly wrong (which I accept), so I didn't want to create a Frankenstein version for the US.

Also, my understanding here is that 16:9 isn't as universal in the US as the UK (my wife works in sales and distribution of culture programs), so again, wanted to make sure everything was watertight.

[Barry_Green]

16:9 basically doesn't exist in the US, as far as broadcast goes. The only 16:9 we have being broadcast is high-def; all standard-def broadcasts are 4:3.

Depending on which network you're going with, they may still want a 16:9 master of your product, but when they broadcast it (over SD) they're going to broadcast it as 4:3.