PAL to NTSC -- Upper or Lower field first?

[hurricane1951]

I have some footage from a PAL cable TV broadcast (4:3) that I need to convert to NTSC for DVD. I'm using Vegas 8.0 as my editor/renderer.

I record the clips to my DVR, then create a DVD (it's the only way I can get the video files from the DVR). I use VideoReDo Plus to extract the MPEG2 files from the VOB files, then I load them into Vegas. These files are always PAL (25fps) and Upper Field first.

However, the Vegas standard render template for DVD NTSC wants to use Lower field first. I've rendered both ways, but unfortunately both my DVD player and my TV monitor automatically handle both formats, so it looks fine both ways.

Should I match the two for my NTSC-only friends?

[jagabo]

Many PAL videos are encoded interlaced but they contain progressive frames. Since the frames are progressive it doesn't really matter which field is displayed first. So taking a TFF PAL video and encoding as BFF NTSC MPEG2 (assuming you do everything else properly) will work, even though the field order is technically wrong.

For video that really is interlaced you should retain the correct field order and field order flags. Or you can change the field order of the video and flag the opposite field order. Vegas may simply be smart enough to do the latter. That is, if you feed it TFF video and ask for BFF output, it will convert the video from TFF to BFF.

You can change a TFF video to BFF (or vice versa) by shifting the frame up or down by one scan line.

[hurricane1951]

Thanks for the info.