Authoring an NTSC program

[spliffy]

Hi,
I am in the UK and all my equipment is PAL.
I have just downloaded an avi which is NTSC (23 fps) and have authored it in NTSC using TMPGEnc Video Author 3 with DIVX. I used some compression to fit the 6.0G program onto a 4.7G disc.
When i played back the dvd on my PAL equipment, I noticed that the panning-motion is not smooth at all.
I then started again, using only part of the avi programme, without compression. The dvd produced was much improved.
Question is....am I doing something wrong, or is it not possible to produce an acceptable dvd with a small amount of compression ?

[Baldrick]

With divx? Are you making a divx dvd? or standard dvd-video?
And what it's runtime of the video?

[guns1inger]

TDA will have duplicated frames to get to 25 fps (PAL), hence the jerkiness. Try FAVC instead. It uses a much smarter method for conversion and should give better results.

[spliffy]

I am trying to author a standard dvd (not divx) in NTSC (which is the original format).
I am then playing back on PAL equipment.

[guns1inger]

If you author as NTSC and play it back on PAL kit then one of three things will happen, depending on the equipment.

1. It will refuse to play. Unlikely, because pretty much all PAL DVD players will play NTSC discs (note : I do not consider console games - PS2, XBox etc - as DVD players).

2. It will play, but the DVD player will convert the signal to PAL when outputting to the TV. How well it does this varies from player to player, so it could still be jerky.

3. The player and TV both play NTSC natively (very common with PAL equipment, if configured correctly), so the signal is nice and clean.

Note also : Many converters do a damn poor job of NTSC conversion when dealing with 23.976 fps source material. Instead of encoding the DVD at 23.976 fps with 3:2 pulldown, they encode it at 29.970 fps by duplicating frames. As with a poor quality PAL conversion, this produces jerky pans and zooms. Again, ConvertXtoDVD and FAVC both convert NTSC files correctly.

[spliffy]

Thankyou for your replies.
I don't think that TMPGEnc Video Author 3 does a great job of converting avis to VOBs, and this seems to be accentuated when you do any form of compression.
As suggested, I have tried ConvertXtoDVD which seems to do much better.
As a test, I tried converting a small avi to VOB files using ConvertXtoDVD.
I then used DVDShrink to compress the VOB files by 20%.
The results were really very good, when viewed on PAL equipment.
I now intend to take an NTSC avi file that has a duration of 2hrs 15mins and burn to a 4.7G disc using ConvertXtoDVD (and it's built-in compression).
Problem is though, that this software doesn't have all the niceities of TMPGenc Video Author 3, so I will import the results into the Video Author to give me the final result.
I'll post my findings when I've done all that !

[spliffy]

Great result !
Thankyou all, particularly Gunslinger !!!!!!!!!!!