Converting PAL to NTSC DVD

Ian in Northampton · #1 (**permalink**) 03-02-2006, 12:18 PM

A question for a friend... He wants to take some footage of his son's performance and send it to a drama school in the USA.

1. Does anyone know if any of teh DVD camcorders you can buy in the UK have the option of recording in NTSC format - or are they limited to PAL?

2. Failing that, what's the quickest/easiest/cheapest (but still good quality...) way of taking a PAL .avi file and burning it as an NTSC DVD?

Thanks team.

karmatized · #2 (**permalink**) 03-03-2006, 03:36 AM

take the dv file, crop a little and export to ntsc easy cheesy lemon squezy

Bananadude · #3 (**permalink**) 03-05-2006, 01:45 PM

I'm not sure it's that simple is it? THe frame rates are different, so will the sound not be out of sync? That's always been my problem when I've converted before, although I have not done PAL>NTSC, only NTSC>PAL, but the audio is invariably out of sync when I've done this, unless you split the audio and video and use a few programmes to work it all out. All a bit complicated and time consuming. If there's a simple prog that does it all for you though, I'd love to know about it!

Ian in Northampton · #4 (**permalink**) 03-05-2006, 02:25 PM

My assumption is that you can import PAL .avi files, edit them in e.g. Premiere Elements, then export as an NTSC file/DVD - but I'm not 100% certain, which is why I asked the question....

karmatized · #5 (**permalink**) 03-05-2006, 03:07 PM

here is something you can try, start a ntsc project and load the pal video into the bin, Right click and interprete as NTSC then resize accordingly.

This way the PAL file is comming inported as NTSC. At worst you should get a video clip thats a tad fast, To fix that write down the length of the pal version to the second and slow down the new clip to match that lenth to the second.

Second, make a pal project inport normally and export as NTSC, i know one of those will work and one wont, but i forget.

I DID THESE KIND OF CONVERSIONS BEFORE, but since what you need is just a recode i would even suggest bypassing premiere for such a task being that you dont need editing.

I know for a fact that TMPEG will do this flawlessly along with PROCODER as well. have used both for such a task with perfect results...

TMPEG has a trial u can check out and do what you need.

Also keep in mind while all these editing softwares are nice no real hollywood studio uses them for MPEG encoding, If your doing a movie or anything like that. Always export to a digital format and encode to MPEG with a better program. EG PROCODER.

Even the best editing programs usually dont get you get deep inside the mpeg file info, like Heady mapping and stuff.

So i would suggest to you download a trial of one of these porgrams and giving it a shot