NTSC to PAL and do I need to do it

[artus]

Hi all im very new to the world of authoring and burning dvd's at the moment I use AVI2dvd and TDA for my authoring as its very easy to use, but my question is this as of late I have been downloading an american tv series in avi format will this programme be in NTSC so I have to convert it to PAL first before I burn it to dvd or can I just convert to dvd and burn

Thankyou in advance

[Duchess]

Unless you're extremely unlucky you should be able to burn and play your DVD's. These days most equipment that is PAL compatible will also handle NTSC playback. However, the inverse seldom holds true (most NTSC won't play PAL).

The only way to know for sure is to burn a DVD and see if it plays

[guns1inger]

I never convert formats. If the source is NTSC, then I output NTSC. I have never had a player that couldn't either output native or switch formats on the fly.

[FulciLives]

NTSC can be 29.970fps or 23.976fps whereas PAL is always 25fps

If the NTSC AVI is 23.976fps then you might as well do a proper NTSC to PAL conversion which is simple to do in that instance but if the NTSC AVI is 29.970fps then the conversion from NTSC to PAL becomes much harder to do and it might be better to leave it NTSC and hope that your DVD player and TV will display it OK (which it probably will).

In the case of a 23.976fps AVI there is as I said a simple way to do a PAL conversion. I don't know if AVI2DVD can be made to do this but basically you encode the AVI into a "hybrid" MPEG-2 DVD spec file. You resize to a PAL DVD resolution but you leave the frame rate at 23.976fps instead of changing it to 25fps. After you have created your MPEG-2 DVD spec file you then run that file through a very simple and easy-to-use program called DGPulldown. You tell DGPulldown to do a 23.976fps ---> 25fps "conversion". It will create a new file (it only takes a few minutes) that is an exact copy of the original file BUT the new file has "header" information that has been changed in such a way so that it will now play back at 25fps even though it was encoded at 23.976fps and this works surprising well. At this point you can treat the file as if it is a "true" PAL video file. You can also use the audio "as is" meaning you don't have to adjust the length of the audio (which is often needed when doing NTSC to PAL the "traditional" way).

Using the DGPulldown "method" will give superior quality but it is a bit more "involved" and using AVI2DVD may not be an option ... plus ... it can't be used if the NTSC source has a frame rate of 29.970fps

I have a guide covering how to do this using the popular MPEG-2 encoder TMPGEnc Plus so you may want to take a look at that.

Here is a link to that guide ---> CLICK HERE

Good Luck !!!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
Actually my guide is for PAL to NTSC using DGPulldown but NTSC to PAL is really the same thing only you change the resolution to 720x576 but leave the frame rate at 23.976fps while telling DGPulldown to do 23.976fps ---> 25fps

Otherwise it is the same process as PAL to NTSC only then you are changing the resolution to 720x480 and leave the frame rate at 25fps while telling DGPulldown to do 25fps ---> 29.970fps

So if you can understand that "reversal" you can still use my guide.

[artus]

thanks for the advise all, in the end I just bit the bullet and burned it to dvd and its all working fine so no need to convert