I need a mentor.

[mikejc111]

This is my very first post here so forgive me if it's in the wrong place.

I keep googling how to perform good conversions PAL-NTSC and back again. Most of the time I see folks on here talk about AVIsynth scripts.

I have installed AVIsynth, and Virtualdub and tried and tried and tried and tried to make something happen according to the idiot-proof tutorials people leave on the net, but I've achieved absolutely nothing - just a load of error messages.

I need someone with patience to email me back and forth to help me achieve this. I have a 2008 Dell laptop with 4GB RAM.

Luke needs training. Who wants to be Yoda?

[hech54]

When I need to do PAL to NTSC conversions for my family back in the states, I just fire up my inexpensive old version of MainConcept Reference, drag my MPEG2 file into it....change the drop-down option to NTSC and fire away. Here is a sample. (Original file was captured from a PAL VHS tape)
http://hotfile.com/dl/187784341/6473741/pal2ntsc.mpg.html
(12MB)
Of course there will be critics to come along to say how "wrong" my quick and dirty method is....but I've seen some pretty crappy format conversions in my life. I'm dealing with one right now that is unfortunately unsolvable.
You have two problems....my trusty old MainConcept is no longer available, and you have a laptop.

[jman98]

I do NOT have the patience to help you. I have some things to say that you should consider.

If you have to do this more than maybe twice, you seriously need to re-evaluate your thinking. Why?
1) You live in the UK. Conversions from NTSC to PAL are almost never necessary in Europe. If you don't have a TV and DVD player capable of handling an NTSC signal then maybe you should consider if it might be better to fix that issue than to do endless conversions. Why do you feel that you need to do NTSC->PAL conversions? You really should not need to do this.
2) Even in the USA and Canada it is possible to buy DVD players that can convert PAL to NTSC. Philips still makes such players in North America and many Philips DVD players can still be made region free for DVD playback. Unless you are a cheap bastard, would it not be better to just give some friend/relative the $40-50 US it costs so they can buy a converting DVD playback and stop you from having to convert everything for them? Or are you one of those people we get who places ZERO value on their own time and would rather piss away hours EVERY freakin' week doing this for years to come than to spend $40-50 ONCE and never convert again? I was dating this girl in Europe some years ago and I just bought her a converting DVD player rather than to have to deal with NTSC->PAL conversion bs. It's just not worth doing this on a regular basis.
3) There's no guarantee that this will work on any given player, but the so-called "patch" method is insanely fast and if it works, it's the ONLY thing that I would say might actually be worth doing on a regular basis.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/166266-PAL-NTSC-DVD-Conversion-%28patch-method%29
4) You do understand that if you are starting with a commercial DVD that ANY converision other than the "patch" method will require you to drop ALL menus, right? This is one of the reasons that I feel that doing this kind of conversion is crazy.
5) There's no "easy" way to do this if you care anything about quality. And even if you do it right, there will ALWAYS be artifacts of some kind in the conversion process. The person watching may not care or notice, but some people will.
6) I guess if you have to do it, this is as good a method as any. But it's not easy.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/convert-pal-ntsc.htm

We've got some members here that have endless patience for this kind of thing. It's always possible that one of them will be willing to help you, but I don't know about doing it via email. We had a thread that has almost 1000 posts in it that was started over a year ago from a guy looking for help and he NEVER got far enough to actually make anything because he kept getting angry about the quality of his video captures and he kept starting over. This didn't dissuade 2 or 3 of our members from helping him beyond the point of ridiculousness, so while I think any plans you may have to do this a lot are crazy, you may yet find some people here who will help you to do it anyway. I doubt that you'll take my suggestions seriously, but about 10% of people in your situation I try to talk out of doing endless PAL<->NTSC conversions do agree that it's nuts and just getting a converting DVD player makes more sense so there's always some chance you'll be in that 10%.

AviSynth is not particularly easy. A lot of the tutorials are not very good (they leave out a lot of critical info due to laziness on the part of the writer) so I will say that it really may not be your fault that you have had problems, but you do need to seriously consider whether you REALLY need to do this kind of thing or not. Even the production houses who do this kind of conversion for making commercial DVDs still can't do it cleanly. Again, there will ALWAYS be artifacts of some kind as a result of this. And I'm not even touching the "fun" you will have on the audio side of this too, where the pitch will noticeably change on each conversion unless you use a tool that can handle that.

[mikejc111]

To Hech54:

Thank you for your thought, but I don't think I can use it, as I'm really after folks who know their AVISynth.

However there's no harm in alternative thoughts like yours, but this one I can't use I'm afraid.

To jman98:

Smartphones in the UK only shoot at 29.9888 fps. I have children and sometimes my phone is the only thing that can catch an amazing moment. My camera and camcorder shoot at 25fps.

My ideal result is a long video piece, eventually burned to DVD called "Moments from 2012" (and other years) compiled from all the video pieces we shot with all our phones/cameras.

To make the phone video footage fit into the compilation, it needs to be converted to match the other footage.

Everything I've tried to convert it with, from Streamclip to Atlantis, has made a jerky result.

Laslty, that was very kind of you to take the time to write so extensively. Thank you.

mj

[bendixG15]

There goes your mentor............ Happy New Year

[manono]

Smartphones in the UK only shoot at 29.9888 fps. I have children and sometimes my phone is the only thing that can catch an amazing moment. My camera and camcorder shoot at 25fps.

Interlaced or progressive? It'll always play jerky if you're converting 29.97fps to 25fps by dropping frames. It'll still be jerky, but much less so, if you can drop fields.

If it doesn't matter to you whether the final result is PAL or NTSC, a less jerky result will come from converting the PAL to NTSC. Duplicating fields results in a less jerky-seeming result than does dropping them.

[mikejc111]

Well Streamclip promised that it would convert from interlaced to progressive, so I made a test clip conversion simply from 29.97 to 24, in the hope that I could then made it 25 PAL, speed up the sound using BeSweet or similar, and then make a final 50i, but G Spot called Streamclip's bluff and the result was still 29.97 so I although I would be happy to go from progressive 24 to 25 and accept the speed difference, I couldn't convert from interlaced to progressive to start the process.

[poisondeathray]

Many "smartphones" record VFR (variable frame rate), not CFR (constant frame rate) . This will introduce a bunch of other problems

No "smartphone" that I know of records interlaced

If you take some sample footage and use mediainfo (view=>text) copy & paste the text results here it will provide more information

29.9888 is non standard framerate. 29.97 is standard. That is why I suspect it's VFR

[manono]

You didn't answer the questions. How about samples from each then? And not run through Streamclip or anything else. Directly from your sources. 10 seconds with steady movement will be plenty.

[mikejc111]

Oh, hang on - I've bloopered. sorry manono you're right 29.97 is progressive. I keep forgetting that NTSC often uses three speeds and we use two.

All the raw sources of my phone videos are at this speed according to GSpot. Let me do some tests and get back to you.

Everyone ignore me for a moment.

[aedipuss]

don't use gspot, it hasn't been updated in years. get mediainfo and use it.

[mikejc111]

Yes well, the sources are indeed progressive at 29.94, which makes it harder to change to even 24 or 23.97. No wonder there were so many motion issues on it.

I've heard people praise something called Procoder Express. Can't see where I can buy it from though.

I'll try a few more things tomorrow.

[manono]

And the 25fps stuff is progressive too? Then your best bet is to make an NTSC DVD, encode the 25fps footage as 25fps and 720x480, with pulldown to output interlaced 29.97fps to match the footage that's already 29.97fps.

With everything being progressive, there's no way to convert the 29.97fps material to 25fps without either getting very jerky playback, or very blurred playback. I won't discuss frame interpolation (frame creation) as it'll be too artifact-ridden to be a viable alternative, in my opinion. One upside to making an NTSC DVD using this method is that even the video that began life at 25fps remains the same length so you don't have to stretch the audio.

Forget Procoder. It doesn't apply, given what you have for sources.

[jagabo]

Of course there will be critics to come along to say how "wrong" my quick and dirty method is....

Yes, the program duplicated every 5th frame to make 25 frames into 30. Since the frames were interlaced you get six little back and forth jumps every second. That is amongst the worst ways of performing a frame rate conversion.

Interlaced chroma channels were also handled as if they were progressive, leading to blurring of the the colors.

Unfortunately, there is no great way of converting interlaced PAL to NTSC.

[jagabo]

Smartphones in the UK only shoot at 29.9888 fps. I have children and sometimes my phone is the only thing that can catch an amazing moment. My camera and camcorder shoot at 25fps.

The smoothest result you'll get without advanced motion interpolation techniques is to convert to 25 fps interlaced. Is the video interlaced or progressive?

[manono]

With everything being progressive, there's no way to convert the 29.97fps material to 25fps without either getting very jerky playback, or very blurred playback.

The smoothest result you'll get without advanced motion interpolation techniques is to convert to 25 fps interlaced. Is the video interlaced or progressive?

Oh yeah, I forgot about that - take the progressive 29.97fps source, bob it to 59.94fps, decimate it down to 50fps, and then reinterlace it to 25fps.

He said it's progressive 29.97fps. At least I think he did. And pdr said smartphones produce progressive footage. As for smoothest though, I still think (if everything is progressive already) making an NTSC DVD out of it as I described earlier will be the way to go. But maybe it has to be PAL.

[orsetto]

It sounds like your particular "smartphone" is designed primarily to make temporary videos viewed on its own screen that are then deleted. It doesn't matter if its iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows: needing to do this much work and ask this many questions just to get simplistic family videos off a stupid phone in a compatible format is totally ridiculous. It defeats the whole point of having a convenient video camera built into the phone: it may be nice that you always have it with you because you always carry the phone, but if it makes what amounts to proprietary video that can't be offloaded and used seamlessly with other videos, what good is it? If making videos of your family and children is your top priority, you need to seriously reconsider your choice of "smartphone," because this one is only going to frustrate you.

You say your videos will eventually be combined with clips shot by other family and friends. What phone or camera are they using? Have you actually tried working with samples from these other people on your computer? Are they all easy to edit and combine? Then you would be best advised to switch from using your troublesome phone to whatever the rest of your group is using, and be compatible with them.

Or, go to the phone vendor and purchase whatever accessories you need to manually play the videos out of the phone into another device. When confronted with convoluted file formats that are not easily worked with directly, sometimes the best option is to play them into a second device that can capture the feed as a more normal conventional file. You may lose a bit of quality, or be forced to drop from "high def" to "standard def," but if the net result is a usable file vs nothing, it can be well worth it. I suspect even analog capture from the phone would look better than scaling, interlacing, and format conversion of the files: we're talking a LOT of work to make these phone files compatible, vs just capturing the phone playback to another unit in a format compatible with those taken by your friends and family. If the only external output available from your phone is HDMI, you may need to also buy an HDMI>S-Video & Composite converter if your PC inputs or DVD recorder can only accept analog input. Some computer video accessories do accept HDMI>HDMI input.

[smrpix]

There are iPhone apps that will allow you to shoot constant frame rates. But Orsetto is right. Phone video is primarily designed for small clips that you watch, email or upload.

Combining this garbage gracefully is the challenge for the next generation of nles.

You may want to pick up one of the home versions of Vegas, it's pretty resiliant. Much of your stuff will, unfortunately, look like crap, but you can drop almost anything on the timeline.

[hech54]

Of course there will be critics to come along to say how "wrong" my quick and dirty method is....

Yes, the program duplicated every 5th frame to make 25 frames into 30. Since the frames were interlaced you get six little back and forth jumps every second.

Yes but you only know that because I told you it was converted from PAL to NTSC. There is NO WAY you are going to notice a repeated single frame every 5 frames with the naked eye.

[jagabo]

There is NO WAY you are going to notice a repeated single frame every 5 frames with the naked eye.

Maybe you wouldn't but I would. A lot depends on particular shots. It would be very obvious on a medium speed smooth panning shot. And not at all on still shots.

And it's not just a single repeated frame. Since it's interlaced video it's a back and forth movement every 10 fields.