Help! What is the best software/way to convert PAL to NTSC?

[astroruben]

Help! What is the best software/way to convert PAL to NTSC? Although there are a number of guides on the site that show how to do it with freeware or shareware applications, is there any software that will make the best results in PAL-to-NTSC convertion? (Better than a DVD player with a built-in converter) I'm willing to pay for it.

Would really appreciate some help with this. Thank you.

[offline]

Not what you want to hear but If you are willing
to pay then get a professional to do it or a hardware
solution (ie. a converter/transcoder or a standalone DVDR with converter)

All the software solutions available take time to
get working correctly and there is a learning curve
for the newbie. Also the quality of the results will
vary and you may have the issue of hybrid video
sources. There is no real "best" way.

I use frameserving (an application called
avisynth.) There are guides avail on the left hand
side or at doom9.org

A quality hardware transcoder will give you excellent
results and work on the fly, but it is the
most expensive method.

[The_Doman]

If you want to do it by software, Procoder will give good results.
I have converted some DV PAL recordings to NTSC DVD and it looked pretty good...

[bugster]

If your source is avi, then IMHO the simplest way is to change the frame rate from 25fps (PAL) to 23.976fps (NTSC film). Adjust the audio to meet the new playing time. Then if DVD is your target, encode to mpeg-2 with 3:2 pulldown.

If your source is already mpeg, it can still be done but requires extra tools and steps.

Whatever your source and target formats, a re-encode is going to be required so some quality will be lost, but probably not enough to be a major problem..

[astroruben]

Thank you for thoughtful replies!

I have a few more questions though:

Is Procoder one of the best software solutions? Is there anything better, like CCE?

I will try to convert PAL video to NTSC film and see how it looks vs. NTSC video. What software do I need to do it very well?

What hardware is better than software mentioned above?

Again, thank you so much for all the input a info you give, I'm already on some kind of track.

[ricky1756]

you could also use the film machine with cinecraft encoder

[dphirschler]

AVIsynth does a great job for me.


Darryl