Blurry NTSC

[MarkGrigsby]

Not sure if this is the right forum, but hopefully someone can explain this!

Please would someone help me understand why PAL conversions of NTSC shows always look a bit 'soft'? I know that, for native NTSC stuff recorded at 480i, there is upscaling on the video for PAL so naturally it will be soft. However, what I don't understand is why the same is true for stuff originally captured on film or HD (e.g. 24). Surely if the transfer is done from the master, then the PAL 576i version should be sharper than the NTSC one?

Any ideas?

[edDV]

If 480i and 576i are both converted from the film master, then 576i will be vertically sharper. It should be anyway but there are many ways to ruin a transfer.

Ignoring frame rate conversion errors, if the sequence is film->480i-> 576i then the 576i picture will be no better in vertical resolution than 480i and possibly softer as the missing vertical lines are interpolated. In most filters, all 576 lines are interpolated from the 480 available as data.

Anything that goes through a realtime standards converter (e.g live broadcast) will loose quaility since the frames need to be interpolated in H, V and time.