Identifying PAL - NTSC

[scmods]

g'day all

Having finally reached the 21st Century and got a DVD, I've been converting some of my mpeg discs to VCD's.

Being in Australia, my system is PAL. NTSC discs will play fine, but appear in black and white.

I have no problem converting NTSC to PAL prior to burning, but I'm wondering if there's any way I can find out what format a file is before I start (ie without burning a VCD of it and seeing if it comes out in colour or not!)

I'm using TMPGEnc to do my conversions.

Thanks!


jeff...

[vitualis]

Converting from NTSC to PAL is a bad bad idea as it rarely works out well.

If you live in Australia, then chances are that you have a multisystems TV (you don't ) or at least a TV that supports PAL 60.

Your DVD player will most likely have a function where you can hard set it to display in "PAL" rather than "Auto" which is usually the default. Have a look at the users manual.

If you have a really good DVD player, it will convert it to real PAL but even if you don't, it will output it to PAL 60 which should work on most TVs produced in the last 10 years.

This is the solution -- i.e., changes the settings on your DVD player/TV. If you have an NTSC source disc, you should strive to encode it into NTSC.

Regards.

[scmods]

Thanks mate

My conversions so far seem to have come out OK, but this will save me a lot of time! I found the DVD setting and it appears to do the job.


jeff...

[KingJohn]

Thanks mate

My conversions so far seem to have come out OK, but this will save me a lot of time! I found the DVD setting and it appears to do the job.
jeff...

My conversions so far seem to have come out OK, Mind too, dont know what he is on about ?

Video-CD PAL (MPEG-1 352x288 25fps CBR 1150kbps, Layer-2 44100Hz 224kbps)

Video-CD NTSC (MPEG-1 352x240 29.97fps CBR 1150kbps, Layer-2 44100Hz 224kbps)

[vitualis]

Well, it will depend on your eyes.

To my eyes, a simple 29.97 fps --> 25 fps conversion looks like crap. I can tell the dropped frames straight away.

You could of course covert 29.97 fps to 23.976 fps using some sort of inverse pulldown method +/- de-interlacing if needed and then increasing the frame rate to 25 fps (and then also speeding up the audio) but this is a damn hassle.

Regards.

[KingJohn]

Well I guess a lot of people must have special equipment or something Judging by the thousands of people who do this in the UK, because they look as good as a DVD at times. So I can only guess your doing something wrong, or need to upgrade your equipment.

[vitualis]

Perhaps you should visit the forums at doom9.org about converting NTSC to PAL (and vice versa). There is a lot more to it than just putting the source file into TMPGEnc and hoping for the best.

But, as I mentioned before, a PAL <--> NTSC software video conversion generally shouldn't even be necessary for a PAL country as most equipment can handle both.

Regards.

[z0nk]

My NTSC 29fps to PAL 25fps conversions look pretty good IMO, although I can somewhat notice the choppiness when there's a long range scene like a car moving along a road, just make sure when you do the conversion you set 'motion search precision' to highest quality. To answer your original question, just open the file in virtual dub and click 'file information' and it'll give you the frame rate.

[KingJohn]

Most 29.97 to 25 conversions do look good. And why move away from your own countries standard if the conversion is simple and fast anyway.

I remember the movie "AntZ" which was a NTSC DVD rip, when the first few minuets were shown "Descending below ground" it was a little jerky, but that was the "Only" part out of the whole movie.