For VCD --> NTSC or NTSC Film???

[bbmagic]

I've never tried making a VCD using the NTSC Film frames per second (23.9 fps). Does anyone do this? What are the advantages / disadvantages? It would seem, to my newbie mind, that it would give you a choppier image.

Thanks in advance!

bbmagic

BTW, is Nero really THE best tool for burning CD/DVD's?

[staind_96]

whatever the framrate of your movie is is what template you should use.
23fps - ntsc film
25fps - pal
29fps - ntsc

if you change the framrate of the movie ie: encode a 29fps movie to 25fps you usally get audio sync problems.

[bbmagic]

What if, for example, I capture some video from my D8 camcorder, render it as MPEG-1 with the 23.9 fps. Would I still have the audio sync problems?
I guess I'm mostly wondering why you would choose a format that had a lower frame rate. Is there some aspect of this that I don't understand (frankly, there's A LOT of this stuff that I don't understand!)?

[VideoBoy]

Let me try to answer your curiosity !!!

But first, you may have sync problem while changing frame rate ONLY if you are encoding both audio and video together. But if you encode them separately and then mux it together you will not have sync problem (at least that is my experience). But the real problem is that the frame rate changed video does not really look exactly the same as original. In my initial experiments I tried converting my 29.97 fps DV footage into 23.96 fps and I could notice that the objects movement was not as smooth as it was in original clips. So I stopped this framerate conversion.

Now to answer your question, why someone would try lower fps. The answer is LOWER THE FPS, HIGHER IS THE QUALITY FOR SAME GIVEN BIT RATE !!!! Yes, you heard it right. So for same bitrate, an NTSC-Film footage will have roughly 25% higher quality that that of NTSC footage. The reason being, NTSC-Film has less frames per second than those in NTSC and hence the bits allocated per frame is higher. Remember bitrate is defined by per second, so less the frames per second, more the bits per frame. Lets take a real life example.

Suppose you have 1500kb rate available for encoding.

So in NTSC mode, you will get 1500/29.97 = 50.05kb per frame.

And

in NTSC-Film mode, you will get 1500/23.96 = 62.6kb per frame

Obviously the frames of NTSC-Film will look better that those in NTSC.

So now you understand why PAL format looks much much better than NTSC ? Not only it is higher vertical resolutions, but also the lower framerate (25fps).

[bbmagic]

That was a perfect answer!
Thanks!
bbmagic