Last word on PAL to NTSC?

[MrMoody]

4. I know you've mentioned this "motion stutter" before, but I've probably used DGPulldown more than anyone, and I have yet to note even one example of it. They play smooth as silk on my setup. This is using DGPulldown on everything from encoded 19.98fps (the minimum possible to use DGPulldown) up to and including 25fps. For me especially, being able to Decimate a silent film DVD back to its original framerate and then run DGPulldown on it afterwards is a huge help. You can imagine the bitrate savings that come from encoding 19.98fps Progressive, as compared to 29.97fps Interlaced. There's no comparison between what DGPulldown can accomplish, and what a hardware standards converter does, if you're referring to the bad PAL to NTSC conversions created by Field Blending. Those things look horrible.

I did say there was other times it was useful, silent films and other nonstandard frame rates of course.

As far as sound quality, no PAL film I've ever converted has sounded all that great to begin with. The new high quality stuff is generally available in NTSC. And oftentimes PAL DVDs have MPEG audio which has to be converted anyway. I don't suppose ffmpeg encodes AC3 any better than BeSweet? I've never tried to compare.

Here's why I can see the stutter. On an NTSC interlaced TV, two matched fields from one film frame display for 33.37ms. If it has a repeated field (pulldown) it shows for half again as long, 50.05 ms. We'll call these S and L for "short" and "long" frames. This gives DGPulldown the choice of those two frame durations for every frame of the movie, and that's why it can get any overall speed from 19.98 to 29.97, using combinations of those.

Normal 23.976>29.97 film pulldown displays like this:
S L S L S L S L S L S L ... continuously. The long frame happens about 12 times per second. This is only barely noticeable and everyone is used to it because it's always been done that way.

19.98 would be all long frames:
L L L L L ... which would be even smoother than regular film pulldown.

But when you go 25>29.97 you get:
S L S L S S L S L S S L S L S S ....

The two "short" (i.e. fast) frames in a row happen about 5 times per second, which is slow enough for me to notice. It's not that bad and I've seen much worse motion artifacts caused by ignorance/stupidity and multiple conversions, but just that and the pitch shift are enough to convince me to slow it down to the correct speed. I guess it comes down to preference.

Here's a pitch shift example: a clip from The Final Countdown.
finalntscclip.mp3
finalpalclip.mp3
These are from the retail DVDs, both versions of which I own, not something I've manufactured.

[manono]

So, you're saying that jerky 2 3 2 3 2 3 doesn't bother you because you're used to it, but 2 3 2 3 2 2 3 does bother you because it's a new and different kind of jerkiness? Neither bothers me much as I'm also used to it. When I look for it, like during a slow pan, I can see it, so I don't look for it. What does bother me though, is blending, which is only too common as a result of using the PAL master for the NTSC DVD. And they're never as clear and detailed as they might be had they taken care to prepare a proper NTSC master. I have some PAL friends that hate the NTSC jerkiness, I guess because they're not used to it. And maybe because they are used to it, the PAL audio speedup doesn't seem to bother them much.

Maybe at some point in the future we'll have TVs with adjustable refresh rates, as computer monitors do, something like those Pioneer sets that can output 72 Hz, and play Telecined Film as 3 3 3 3.

So I apologize. When you said that DGPulldown made a DVD play jerky, I thought it was resulting from something you did wrong at some point during the conversion.

[MrMoody]

So, you're saying that jerky 2 3 2 3 2 3 doesn't bother you because you're used to it, but 2 3 2 3 2 2 3 does bother you because it's a new and different kind of jerkiness?

Yes, pretty much that's what I'm saying. And the new kind is more noticeable because it's a slower cycle AND it's avoidable by correcting the speed is what I'm also saying.

Maybe at some point in the future we'll have TVs with adjustable refresh rates, as computer monitors do, something like those Pioneer sets that can output 72 Hz, and play Telecined Film as 3 3 3 3.

They SHOULD have made HDTV 72 Hz, but NOOOOooo.... now that it's 60 again, any such TV has to do complicated IVTC to straighten it out.