NTSC to PAL

egproductions

egproductions

Veteran
An Israeli television network wants to broadcast a few episodes of a series I produce. The series was shot at 23.976 SD and HD resolutions. I could use a little guidance on PAL conversion methods since I've never personally done this. I would like to know what is the right way of doing this and how much a conversion house typically charges (i'm assuming I can't do a true PAL conversion myself) and would also like to find out the best way to do it if I wanted to attempt to do it myself (I don't want to just throw 24FPS in a 25fps timeline). I'm editing using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and live in the NYC area.

Thanks!
 
The best free method would be in AVISynth. I'm not sure if there are professional *software* suites capable out there; most professional standards conversions are done in hardware (Snell Alchemist, Teranex, etc).

You can do a dumb conversion in any editor by dropping it in, though the exact way you convert is also up to you. Typically for 24p material, PAL conversion is merely a 4% speedup of material. As for color standards, I have no experience with PAL broadcasters, so ask them how they'd like the color to be encoded, because in the digital age, actual PAL color may not even be necessary.

If you were in AVISynth, you'd literally just do the following:

AssumeFPS(25)

You'd have to convert your audio to match as well; I believe MeGUI offers an easy system to choose FPS conversions on audio, but I seldom (if ever) do this, so take a look around. Your options here aren't too limited as long as you have a progressive 24p source. Also, do note that during the audio conversion, 23.976 -> 25fps will of course be different than a 24fps -> 25fps conversion.

If you have interlaced material (telecined), I'd try to inverse telecine the footage (again, easy with AVISynth) and then speed it up; if it contains segments of 29.97fps footage however, you'll unfortunately have to do an actual motion compensated standards conversion. This can be in AVS, but it's slow. There's a bunch of facilities in NYC to do the conversion with hardware, but you'll have to check with them for rates.
 
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