-Question about 25fps PAL to NTSC??-

I

Ill Eagle

Well-known member
I was wondering do some people just shoot with PAL camera's in the US?? Since it is closer to 24fps than 30fps.......

Is the only way to get PAL on an NTSC DVD by converting it and then slowing it down by 4%?? What if you don't plan to go to film, would you still HAVE TO convert 25fps to 24??
 
DVfilm has software that adds pulldown to go to NTSC. It doesn't sound like they slow the footage down. I haven't tried it but it's worth a shot.

http://www.dvfilm.com/atlantis/

You can also do this in some NLE's. I think Final Cut 5 does it with Compressor.. There are other methods too...google.
 
Yes, shooting PAL gives you the benefit of a framerate cose to 24fps. It also has more resolution. But it's a little bit of a pain converting to NTSC. We shot a short with a PAL DVX and then converted. I didn't do the conversion process so I'm not sure how it was handled. I think Cleaner was used to convert. Oh, we used a PAL camera since that's what we had.
 
Yes, I have a PAL camera and recently worked with HansK on a short.
There are several threads about this issue on this web site and I never managed to do the conversion exactly the way I wanted it to be.
I edited everything in PAL in Premiere Pro and generated the PAL and NTSC DVDs and the web files with Cleaner XL. I fed Cleaner with the DV AVI file and it generated a DVD MPEG file in NTSC. I was very happy with the job done by Cleaner but could not exactly figure out what it did, if it added some pulldown or not. Aside the change in resolution, the pixel quality of the result was to me the same as the original. How could it be worse anyway?
And no it is not slower than PAL, the final footage on the DVD has the exact same length then the PAL footage.

My problem was when I wanted to generate a DV AVI file in NTSC from the PAL DV AVI, in order to export it to an NTSC DV tape. This cannot be done with Cleaner. I've heard several times that it was possible but when I ask what the exact process is, I never get a clear detailed answer, so I didn't use Cleaner for that.
So, I tried the only tool I had, that is Premiere Pro. I tried to convert directly from PAL to NTSC when exporting the project. The pixel quality of the output is excellent, but the frame rate is not. Premiere will clone every 5 frame to fill the gaps and add the 6 missing frames per second. It would never add a pulldown.
I then tried to slow it down to 24P and from that convert to NTSC, but I still got the same result. I started this thread at that time but it went nowhere: http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/showthread.php?t=32387
So, if I do a DVD in NTSC I'm happy with what I get. If I want to generate an NTSC DV tape I'm less satisfied but the result is far from bad. A very few people would notice there's no pulldown.
I heard several times Barry Green saying that Sony Vegas would add the normal or advanced pulldown to a pure 24P footage. I haven't tried it.
I still don't know if Final Cut does it properly. Haven't tried it either.
I don't know about Avid.

Since then I've worked on nothing but that's still an open issue I have to solve for the next project.
So for the future I would slow down my 25P to 24P and then find a way that works to add the pulldown when exporting to a DV file.
 
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