converting PAL to NTSC

[mattyslotz]

I have a friend who is sending me a PAL miniDV cassette. If I am using Premiere Pro 1.5 and a NTSC miniDV camera to transfer the footage using firewire, will I be able to transfer the footage to NTSC? Will I be able to capture the video at all? Do I then need to 'interpret footage in Premiere Pro to make the PAL video into NTSC? Am I just wasting my time here? If anyone can help a clueless gal figure this out, it would be most most appreciated...thanks

[turk690]

You have two problems here: 1st u need to capture the PAL tape, & 2nd u need to convert it to NTSC. To capture a PAL tape, strictly speaking, u need a PAL camcorder. All miniDV camcorder brands work strictly this way: ONLY PAL models will play/record PAL, & ONLY NTSC models will play/record NTSC. The ONLY exception to this is Sony: ALL Sony DV camcorders CAN play back either PAL or NTSC tapes. This is an undocumented feature; but it still remains a PAL Sony miniDV camcorder will only record PAL signals, & NTSC will only record NTSC. Premiere 1.5, however, will NOT allow capture of a PAL stream playing back from a Sony NTSC miniDV camcorder; it has detected NTSC h/w, and therefore deems the PAL DV stream illegal and mutes it. A way around this is to turn off device control, then restart the capture (closing the capture interface and opening it again F5). Assuming capture was successful and u have strung the AVI onto the timeline, one quick way of turning it to NTSC would be to export it back as DV AVI, but deliberately choosing NTSC attributes (pixel aspect ratio & frame rate). Depending on how much movement is in scenes on the video, the end result might have excessive judder and jerkiness, as Premiere attempts to extrapolate 25fps to 29.97. A better way would be, after capture, to close Premiere, then load the PAL DV AVI file into a systems converter program, and let it create the NTSC DV AVI. I know of two such programs but I would probably be accused of naming and mongering specific programs on this site, which I have been warned of in the past, is a complete no-no here. Tough.

[hiptune]

I have a friend who is sending me a PAL miniDV cassette. If I am using Premiere Pro 1.5 and a NTSC miniDV camera to transfer the footage using firewire, will I be able to transfer the footage to NTSC? Will I be able to capture the video at all? Do I then need to 'interpret footage in Premiere Pro to make the PAL video into NTSC? Am I just wasting my time here? If anyone can help a clueless gal figure this out, it would be most most appreciated...thanks

I would do the conversion from PAL to NTSC in the encoding step. Do any capture, editing, etc. in PAL, render out to AVI in PAL saved. And then last in mpg encoding do the switch to NTSC. I have gotten stunning results with Procoder, and the less expensive Tmpgenc doing a conversion. No fear!

[mattyslotz]

Thanks for your help guys...it sounds like I have a long road ahead but your suggestions are great and I will try them all...Thank you!