PAL to NTSC on Canon Xl2

[Jonas Scott]

1. I wasn't able to find this information--if this is a repeat, kindly nudge me in the right direction. I have shot a film in PAL, and need perfect transfer to NTSC. On a side note I used all three Canon lenses(16X manual, 20X Standard, 3X Wide) and the manual really was a joy to use!
Anyway, on Adobe Premiere there is a severe loss in quality when transferring to NTSC. So, what program might I use to transfer to NTSC perfectly so that I may continue my pursuits of aesthetic greatness?

2. A question that has always bugged me: When movies are made 24P(whether that be Film or Digital) and transferred to DVD or played on Televesion, does this not make the frame rate the NTSC standard? (29.97) Why make a film on 24P if it will be converted this way?

Anyway, I hope you'll take the time to help enlighten!

[Wes Coughlin]

Originally Posted by Jonas Scott

2. A question that has always bugged me: When movies are made 24P(whether that be Film or Digital) and transferred to DVD or played on Televesion, does this not make the frame rate the NTSC standard? (29.97) Why make a film on 24P if it will be converted this way?

DVD's do not have to meet NTSC standards. If you edit in a 24 fps time line, and out put in 24 fps to dvd (mpeg2), then the DVD will be in 24 fps. You can confirm this by scanning frame by frame in the DVD player and checking the timecode. Most major movies are on 24p DVD's, which also decreases file size, since you have 6 less frames per second then standard NTSC.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Welcome to DVinfo Jonas. To answer the question which I had to edit out of your original post: Yes, that was too immature for DVinfo, sorry.

Regarding PAL to NTSC transfer, I have used DVfilm Atlantis myself and it seemed to work fine. However scenes with a lot of fast motion seem to suffer somewhat, especially if you look at individual frames. But this seems unavoidable since 5 new frames have to be created every second.

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

[Jonas Scott]

Thanks a lot! I'll definitely check the program out. On a side note, are there places you can send your tapes to get converted without having to dish out the money for an entire program? This will probably be my last project with the PAL Xl2.

[Dennis Hingsberg]

I've worked with PAL cameras extensively despite living here in North America. I've shot many short films using PAL back before 24p cameras like the DVX and XL2 existed. Search for posts in my name and you will get all the information you need. Atlantis is no good, other then that I've also tried AVS Synth scripts and Virtual Dub. Google those. The best process in the end I came up with to get a wicked 24p film look in NTSC from 25f/50i footage (like 28 Days Later, 9 Songs, etc..) is the following:

1.) Shoot 25f/50i PAL and be happy.

2.) Do not try and convert these clips to NTSC just so you can edit NTSC. If you shoot with PAL you want your FINAL output project to be in 24p format, not PAL or NTSC! Say what? Read on.

3.) Import your PAL 50i footage onto a 24 frame per second timeline. Your program will put 1 frame of PAL to every frame on the 24 frame timeline. This means that for every second of PAL footage there is 25 frames, but on your timeline 1 second of footage only has 24 frames - what happens with the extra frame? Does it get dropped, dissappear, go away? NO! It just gets ADDED to the overall timeline. So every second of PAL footage gives you ONE extra frame of footage to your total project.

60 seconds of PAL footage means you'll end up with 60 seconds of 24fps footage on a timeline PLUS 1 frame for every second you had. In this case another 60 frames (ie. we had 60 seconds X 1 extra frame for each second = 60 frames). That means your 60 seconds of PAL footage on your timeline changes to 60 seconds + 60 frames OR 60 seconds + 2.5 seconds which equals 62.5 seconds.

The easiest way to just think of this is that your footage gets stretched by 4%. ie. 60 seconds X 1.04 = 62.4 seconds.

What you've effectively accomplished is comformed your PAL footage to 24fps/48i. So far it is still interlaced, but no longer in 25fps/50i. (If you've shot progressively with a PAL camera your footage already is 24p on your timeline.)

4.) So now your box office smashing feature is fully edited. When you preview it you notice the audio you shot straight to the PAL camera seems stretched so that it is lower in pitch. It is. It's longer by 4% now remember? In most cases you will not notice this for dialog scenes. But for music you will notice it more, a lot more. Hopefully you did not record any music to your PAL camera while making your film.

TIP: If you don't want your sound to sound stretched at all then shoot your sound on a separate source, bring it into your favorite audio editing program (Adobe Audtion works) and stretch it by 4% using pitch correction, then bring it back onto your timeline, line up your video and audio up using the clapper that you used throughout production (what? you didn't use one?) and everything becomes synced up like magic!

5.) Render your project out to a new file. It is now a 24fps/48i file. If your editing program has a really good motion based de-interlacer use it upon output. If not then you will have to run your file through a good de-interlacer.

6.) Your footage is now 24p. Your project is done. Upload it to sites, put it on YouTube and let everyone see your masterpiece. While you're at it, make a couple of film print at $300 per minute (because your footage is 24p afterall) and everyone is SMILING!

7.) What? You want a DVD in NTSC format? Use a program like After Effects to perform a 3:2 pulldown on your 24p footage to the 29.97 NTSC file format. The 3:2 pull down process is the exact same process used to convert film shot movies to the DVD NTSC format. Next time you watch a DVD shot originally on film in the USA, pause the movie and advance one frame at a time. You will see 3 frames change, then 2 stay the same, then 3 frames change, then 2 stay the same... etc.. this is how 24fps film is stretched out to conform to 29.97 NTSC.

8.) What a friggin hassle you say? Remember PAL offers 20% higher vertical resolution than NTSC. By the time you add some cinebars to your NTSC footage you are really shooting 720x360. When you add bars to PAL footage you end up with 720x460! Only PAL footage can be conformed to film frame rates at a one to one frame ratio. PAL is the FIRST choice for shooting films that will eventually transfer to FILM. One reason is the extra VERTICAL resolution that all cameras suffer from - even 24p cameras.

Hope this has been helpful.

[Jonas Scott]

"5.) Render your project out to a new file. It is now a 24fps/48i file. If your editing program has a really good motion based de-interlacer use it upon output. If not then you will have to run your file through a good de-interlacer."


Thanks Dennis, this is just what I needed. A couple questions: I loaded my footage today under a 24p timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and under the project settings, it read 24p NTSC. In your instructions, it sounded as if the 24p timeline should be independent of PAL or NTSC. Could it become a problem in your guidelines to edit a 24p, NTSC timeline? Also for anybody who knows, does Premiere Pro 1.5 have a de-interlacer? I don't think I've ever come across one.

[Dennis Hingsberg]

Jonas, sorry I missed your post and have not replied sooner.

Whether or not you keep your timeline in your native resolution (in your case PAL) or change it to NTSC should depend on if and how well your program can resize a PAL frame to NTSC frame size without introducing artifacts.

Remember that the pixel aspect ratio between PAL and NTSC are slightly different. Thus it's not a simple matter of each PAL pixel fitting into a NTSC pixel space.

i.e.
NTSC = 720 horizontal pixels, 480 vertical in 4:3 frame.
PAL = 720 horizontal pixels, 576 vertical in a 4:3 frame.

From this you can see that somehow the program must fit 576 vertical pixels into 480! It's obvious some interpolation needs to take place and the question is whether or not Premiere Pro, or 6.5, or whatever NLE is being used will do a good job.

Since I've found most NLE's programs do not do a great job I leave the work for AVI Synth and VirtualDub which I'll get to shortly.

As for deinterlacing within your NLE software I would avoid it unless using a third party plug-in that does really good motion-based deinterlacing. Generally the built in deinterlacers do simply that - deinterlace. Effectively this cuts your vertical resolution in HALF. Yikes - that's no good. (But it could be okay for a draft copy or if you'll be shrinking the output resolution say for online web content or something.)

Motion based de-interlacers are better because they concentrate on only deinterlacing the footage where MOTION in the frame is present. Effectively the full resolution is maintained and only the areas where there are interlace artifacts (sometimes called jaggy's) are smoothened out and interpolated.

To address both these issues in one shot what I do is run the final edit (sometimes in RAW uncompressed AVI format) through AVI Synth and Virtual Dub. It can resize your PAL footage to 720 x 480, deinterlace it motion-based and do all kinds of processing to your video using 3rd party FREE add-on filter plugins. Usually when running my video through I would use VirtualDub to also add some matte bars, do some final contrast or brightness tweaking and my favourite apply a dynamic video noise reduction filter to remove CCD noise and video grain.

These tools are indispensable and should be part of EVERY filmmakers bag of complete tricks! To learn more check out www.avisynth.org and www.virtualdub.com

By the way the single line in AVI script to resize your video frame size from PAL to NTSC is:
BilinearResize(720, 480)
or you can use:
LanczosResize(720,480)

These are two different algorithms used to perform the interpolation. Virtual Dub also has some resizing filters that come with it with even more methods and algorithms you can try until you like the results.

Let me know if you have any other questions.