Hi VCDHelpers,

I have a lot of PAL VHS material (original) that I'm trying to convert to SVCD for easier viewing in the USA. If I create a PAL SVCD, it won't work in my DVD Player (Aiwa), I have to create an NTSC SVCD.

For capture, I'm using a PAL VCR and a Matrox Marvel G-200 to get interlaced MJPEG at 704x576 25 fps, audio at 44100

Next I extract the audio, alter the sample rate to 42.283 (44100 * 23.976 fps NTSCFilm / 25 fps PAL), resample to 44100 and save it as wav (I use SoundForge but I guess that many other audio tools should be able to do this)

Then I use virtualdub to open the MJPEG avi and the wav audio and I set the video framerate to match audio duration. This takes care of the framerate conversion and gives a nice film framerate with good audio sync 8). I set virtualdub to filter and frameserve all to TMPGEnc (NTSCFilm SVCD, no framerate conversion) and that's it!

The problem that I have is handling the resizing of interlaced material. Horizontal res has no problem but I couldn't solve the vertical resolution. I start with slightly less than 576 interlaced lines and I want slightly less than 480 interlaced lines (the 'slightly less' comes from edge cropping). I haven't found any good way to achieve this. So far the best result that I could get is the following combination of filters in virtualdub:

2d Cleaner optimized (interlaced, thr 25, area 5x5)
smart smoother (diam 7, str 50, inter yes)
smart deinterlacer
smart resize

This means using the deinterlacer to convert to progressive and then set TMPGEnc to deal with a progressive source. It works, the picture quality is good but not great and it is very slow.

I'm looking for ideas on how to improve the whole process (quality and/or speed). Probably the key is finding how to skip the de-interlacer and get it resized properly so that the result is still interlaced correctly. Does anybody know how to achieve this? I've searched the forum for PAL to NTSC conversion but I couldn't find an answer to this question.