Best results PAL to NTSC for DVD

[Michael_Bott]

Being in the UK I originate my projects in PAL but as I am intending to self-publish for international distribution, I need to deliver on NTSC DVD. At the moment, when I create an NTSC MPEG-2 file in Vegas, the output displays a regular 'blurring' on any movement, particularly camera movement. I guess it pulses every second as the frame rates catch up with each other. It seems there is some sort of interpolation going on to smooth out the difference between 25fps and 29.970fps. However, the resulting artifact is unwatchable - is there any way round this?

I am shooting 25p and using the MainConcept encoder and the standard template for NTSC Widescreen to output.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Michael_Bott]

I seem to have answered my own question. Problem solved by NOT shooting progressive PAL. 50i PAL to NTSC seems to work fine. Don't know the technical reason though - any opinions?

 

[Pesie]

I have some experience with PAL 25P footage (DVX100) that had to be transfered to a NTSC dvd for an American filmfestival. I tried to convert from 25P PAL to 24P NTSC, but despite all the good advices there were still problems in the output on dvd. The most simple and fairly good way to do it is very simple:
1. edit your movie in a PAL 25P project, render the final mix to a PAL DV AVI 25P file
2. open a new NTSC 60i project and insert the PAL DV AVI 25P file from step 1
3. render to a NTSC 60i MPEG2 file, best quality etc.
So you go the interlaced route from step 2, but your footage still will look progressive when projected on an NTSC beamer of NTSC tv. Only the higher number frames per second is a bit visible, but no real motion problems I had when trying to create a progressive NTSC file. The number of compliments on the image quality we received at the festival (and the grand prize we won) told me enough about the final product we produced.