AVI -> DVD Compliant MPG (Frame Rates)

[Flave]

Well, what a wild ride! I started going this ('this' being video conversion) about a month ago and I think I've learned enough to get a video engineer's degree. And I still feel pretty ignorant.

I think I've deluded myself into thinking I understand enough about 'this' now to actually do something useful but there is one thing that I just can't seem to wrap my little brain around: Video frame rates.

Most of the stuff I do is convert XVid or DivX AVIs to DVD compliant MPGs. I should state here that I use an AVISynth script to frameserve CCE to do these conversions. I should also state that most of these source AVIs are usually 23.97 fps NTSC, but I also get the occasional 25 fps PAL.

Here is a sample script:

AVISource("MyVideo.avi")
BicubicResize(720,480)
# do an AddBorders() for 2.2, 2.35 AR movie here and adjust 480 above
ConvertFPS(29.97)

You'll note from the last line in my script that what I've been doing to get DVD compliant MPGs with the proper frame rate is to add a ConvertFPS(29.97). But from reading many posts on this and other forums, I've gathered that this is definitley not a good thing to do. I've gathered that the preferred route for a 23.97 Film source is to leave it at that frame rate and then run Pulldown on the converted MPG. But when I do this, I get very jerky video during camera pans. At first I thought that maybe my video playback software was not obeying the pulldown flags, so I built a DVD image and tried playing that through my DVD software. That too unfortunately produced jerky video. Well, I thought, maybe the DVD playback software also wasn't checking the pulldown flags, so I burned a DVD and tried it on my DVD player. Yes, you guessed it, jerky video on my DVD player as well.

The puzzling aspect of all this is that if I use the 'not recommended' approach (ConvertFPS), I get perfectly fine video (although I guess it's more degraded than it should be).

Can anyone give me a clear and concise explanation of what I am doing wrong or what I should be doing? (And I'd like to stick to CCE for encoding -- I find it much faster/better than anything else I've tried.)

Oh, one more thing. Then, of course, there's PAL. Is it ok to ConvertFPS(29.97) a PAL source?

TIA.

[FOO]

Have you read this

http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm