Big advice needed!

Michael_Bott

Michael_Bott

Well-known member
Hi folks - and HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVID:grin:

I am in the UK and I'm due to encode a big project for DVD during the next few days going from 25p 16:9 PAL to NTSC for domestic release in the US. I will be supplying the DLT direct to the distibutors to a tight deadline so I need to get this right.

I've been experimenting with Procoder 2, TMPGEnc 3.0 and, of course, Mainconcept in Vegas 6.

Now, Procoder may be a fine encoder but it's an AWFUL transcoder (from PAL to NTSC at least), so I reluctantly have to drop that out of the equation.

The problem is is how to keep scenes with camera motion, particularly long pans, looking smooth when going from PAL to NTSC. SO far, I have been using fairly standard presets, outputting to a 29.97fps framerate. With TMPGEnc I get good, clean frames but with an obvious 'jump' every second which is irritating on pans across otherwise gorgeous landscape. With Mainconcept straight from the Vegas timeline, the motion is much smoother, but instead of the 'jump' I get a blur - I can't make up my mind which is the lesser of these two evils.:(

Am I missing something? Is there a way of doing this that will ensure my audience won't have to suffer these artifacts? I won't pretend to understand the technicalities, but I have recently read that I should be encoding to 23.976fps progressive and that pulldown will occur in the NTSC DVD player itself. But if I do that, what sort of artifacts will the audience get then?

Does anyone have experience of these issues and how they are overcome? Obviously there are EXPENSIVE solutions out there but frankly, I don't have the budget. Any hints on software/workflow/settings gratefully recieved.

Michael
 
From my experience and using only Vegas for conversions, you have to make sure that all your settings in project properties and export window (from PAL to NTSC) regarding frame order (lower fields, upper fields etc.) are set to PROGRESSIVE. No interlacing. For me this works best and Vegas is doing good job here. Of course there is always high(er) quality solution, but it's expensive.

Hope this helps.
Inform us on progress.

Cheers
 
Thanks darmanb. Always on the lookout for a sneaky interlace getting in there! Actually this is one extraordinary omission in Procoder - it doesn't allow progressive output to MPEG - weird.

The avenue I'm investigating is rendering to 23.976fps. I know this will give me a file that is more watchable on this side of the Atlantic on a PC, but what will customers over there get to see watching it played on a domestic NTSC player?
 
Region 1 discs coming out of Hollywood are laid to disc in 24p (23.976); the players insert 3:2 pulldown to play on an NTSC TV. For the movie part, anyway.
 
Hello David - and happy birthday again!

Yes - that's what I thought. My concern is that having gone through a 25p to 24p transcode in Mainconcept or TMPGEnc, are there any serious artifacts likely to be introduced or exaggerated by an NTSC player? Of course that doesn't normally happen with movies but it seems the intricacies of this process can throw up some oddities if you don't watch out.

However, would the advice be to encode to 23.976 rather than 29.97 from a 25p project?

By the way, CELLULOID is a great tool and I've made good use of warm film look in appropriate place in this project. The ease and speed of getting a particular look when you're chasing deadlines is much appreciated - thanks.

Michael
 
UPDATE: Having bad mouthed Procoder 2 for bad transcode 25p PAL to NTSC, I now find that if outputting to 23.976 fps it is the best. Previously it was crashing everytime I tried 23.976 or 24p so I never saw what it was capable of. I installed an update and it is fine now. 29.97fps is still awful though.
 
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