Complete newbie: help me converting PAL audio to NTSC on a Mac

[slowsoul]

Hi everybody, newbie here with VERY limited experience at video editing.

This is what I have to do--->I have a high quality NTSC anime series with chinese audio and a bad quality PAL video with Italian audio, so I wanvto to extract the audio and remux it with the NTSC video to get a much better quality product.

FPS of NTSC is 29,970628, FPS of PAL is 25.

Managed to get the first episode right changing the audio time (exactly at 104.18%) with Oceanaudio, the second episode turns out to be much harder and I can't understand why. Any tips? Thank you in advance.

[Cornucopia]

Those NTSC and PAL fps rates are helpful as a provenance reference but that's about it. Because audio doesn't have FPS, it's only the accompanying video that does. Audio has sample rate (44.1kHz, 48kHz, etc).

You just need to see if the runtime is the same, the startpoint is the same, and the edits are the same.

My educated guess is that you lucked out on the 1st try, where probably the startpoint and the edits were the same, so all you needed to do was a time stretch/shrink (with or without compensating pitch shift) to line up the 2nd audio with the 1st.

Your 2nd set probably is more complicated with different cuts, aka a different edit (e.g. director's cut vs theatrical, etc).

Only way to truly fix that is graphically line them up in parallel in a multitrack editor (DAW, NLE) and recreate the necessary cuts, shifting as you go through the title.


Scott

[jagabo]

Audio and Video within a container (MP4, MKV, AVI, etc.) don't need to start at the same time, end at the same time, or have the same duration. Beyond that, releases in different countries are often different cuts of the movie with shots added or deleted. Especially when broadcast on TV. You need to figure out exactly what the differences are and compensate accordingly. There are literally hundreds of threads in these forums dealing with that.

[slowsoul]

Thanks for the answers. I searched for other threads indeed, but I ended up somehow more confused than before.

The complication here is that the Italian dub PAL episodes are 24 minutes long, while the chinese dub NTSC files (which are sourced by a ISO file) have a 25 minutes runtime. Wouldn't this suggest that they run at 24 fps? It has to be noted that the different dubs seem identical despite the different runtime. No scenes added or significant differences to my eyes, just one exact minute more in the NTSC version.

More to this: if I extract the ISO into a MKW I end up with a file which runs at 29.970 fps, hence my confusion.

I realize this stuff would be obvious to the professional or the initiated but it's all very complicated for me.

[ProWo]

Thanks for the answers. I searched for other threads indeed, but I ended up somehow more confused than before.
The complication here is that the Italian dub PAL episodes are 24 minutes long, while the chinese dub NTSC files (which are sourced by a ISO file) have a 25 minutes runtime. Wouldn't this suggest that they run at 24 fps? It has to be noted that the different dubs seem identical despite the different runtime. No scenes added or significant differences to my eyes, just one exact minute more in the NTSC version.
More to this: if I extract the ISO into a MKW I end up with a file which runs at 29.970 fps, hence my confusion.
I realize this stuff would be obvious to the professional or the initiated but it's all very complicated for me.

This is not as complicated as it seems.
Your Italian PAL video is 25 fps, your Chinese NTSC video is probably 23.976 fps, telecined to 29.97 fps.
This means that you need to change the audio stream of the Italian stream by a factor of 0.959040 (from 25fps to 23.976 fps).
Then you can mux the newly created Italian audio stream to your Chinese NTSC video stream.
This can be easily done with clever Ffmpeg GUI, but only in Windows, not on your Mac.

[slowsoul]

Thanks for the answers. I searched for other threads indeed, but I ended up somehow more confused than before.
The complication here is that the Italian dub PAL episodes are 24 minutes long, while the chinese dub NTSC files (which are sourced by a ISO file) have a 25 minutes runtime. Wouldn't this suggest that they run at 24 fps? It has to be noted that the different dubs seem identical despite the different runtime. No scenes added or significant differences to my eyes, just one exact minute more in the NTSC version.
More to this: if I extract the ISO into a MKW I end up with a file which runs at 29.970 fps, hence my confusion.
I realize this stuff would be obvious to the professional or the initiated but it's all very complicated for me.

This is not as complicated as it seems.
Your Italian PAL video is 25 fps, your Chinese NTSC video is probably 23.976 fps, telecined to 29.97 fps.
This means that you need to change the audio stream of the Italian stream by a factor of 0.959040 (from 25fps to 23.976 fps).
Then you can mux the newly created Italian audio stream to your Chinese NTSC video stream.
This can be easily done with clever Ffmpeg GUI, but only in Windows, not on your Mac.

That was more or less what I thought would have been the MO. But, for example, episode 3 is much longer than the others (difference with PAL is around 1.30 minutes, compared to the 1.00 of the other episodes). No idea why, there are no additional scenes because stretching the Italian audio to the same length of the Chinese stream makes an almost correct sync. Nothing makes sense here.

[jagabo]

More to this: if I extract the ISO into a MKW I end up with a file which runs at 29.970 fps, hence my confusion.

NTSC DVD's only support 29.97 fps. If 24 fps film was simply sped up to 29.97 fps it would be comically fast. So film sources are slowed to 23.976 fps (really 24000/1001) and duplicate frames (really fields) are added to make it 29.97 fps (really 30000/1001). That results in a 29.97 fps video with the same runtime as the 23.976 video. 24p film is often simply sped up to 25 fps for PAL releases (the difference is too noticeable by most people). So, if you're right that the only difference is the frame rate, the difference in runtime between the PAL and NTSC versions is the difference between 23.976 fps and 25 fps. So the NTSC version runs 25/(24000/1001), or 1.0427083333..., times longer than the PAL version. Or looking at it the other way the PAL version runs 0.95904095904... times shorter than the NTSC version.

[ProWo]

That was more or less what I thought would have been the MO. But, for example, episode 3 is much longer than the others (difference with PAL is around 1.30 minutes, compared to the 1.00 of the other episodes). No idea why, there are no additional scenes because stretching the Italian audio to the same length of the Chinese stream makes an almost correct sync. Nothing makes sense here.

To keep an overview, you need the following data of both videos:
frame rate, exact duration.
You can get both with mediainfo.
Only then can you find out the exact correlations, always assuming that the video contents are exactly the same.

[rgr]

Hi everybody, newbie here with VERY limited experience at video editing.

This is what I have to do--->I have a high quality NTSC anime series with chinese audio and a bad quality PAL video with Italian audio, so I wanvto to extract the audio and remux it with the NTSC video to get a much better quality product.

FPS of NTSC is 29,970628, FPS of PAL is 25.

Managed to get the first episode right changing the audio time (exactly at 104.18%) with Oceanaudio, the second episode turns out to be much harder and I can't understand why. Any tips? Thank you in advance.

It's convenient to do things like that in Vegas.
You place both clips on the timeline and you can compare by muting out one of the video tracks.
You can shrink/stretch the PAL video track to match the frame positions, and then shrink/stretch the PAL audio track by the same factor.

[slowsoul]

That was more or less what I thought would have been the MO. But, for example, episode 3 is much longer than the others (difference with PAL is around 1.30 minutes, compared to the 1.00 of the other episodes). No idea why, there are no additional scenes because stretching the Italian audio to the same length of the Chinese stream makes an almost correct sync. Nothing makes sense here.

To keep an overview, you need the following data of both videos:
frame rate, exact duration.
You can get both with mediainfo.
Only then can you find out the exact correlations, always assuming that the video contents are exactly the same.

NTSC video: 29,970 (30000/1001) FPS, 25 mins.
PAL video: 25,000 FPS, 23m 35s

Don't know if it's a relevant piece of info, but I took the NTSC video out of the ISO with MakeMXV.

[slowsoul]

Thanks for the answers. I searched for other threads indeed, but I ended up somehow more confused than before.
The complication here is that the Italian dub PAL episodes are 24 minutes long, while the chinese dub NTSC files (which are sourced by a ISO file) have a 25 minutes runtime. Wouldn't this suggest that they run at 24 fps? It has to be noted that the different dubs seem identical despite the different runtime. No scenes added or significant differences to my eyes, just one exact minute more in the NTSC version.
More to this: if I extract the ISO into a MKW I end up with a file which runs at 29.970 fps, hence my confusion.
I realize this stuff would be obvious to the professional or the initiated but it's all very complicated for me.

This is not as complicated as it seems.
Your Italian PAL video is 25 fps, your Chinese NTSC video is probably 23.976 fps, telecined to 29.97 fps.
This means that you need to change the audio stream of the Italian stream by a factor of 0.959040 (from 25fps to 23.976 fps).
Then you can mux the newly created Italian audio stream to your Chinese NTSC video stream.
This can be easily done with clever Ffmpeg GUI, but only in Windows, not on your Mac.

Update: most of the episodes I worked so far are more or less syncable if I convert the PAL audio from 25 fps to 23.976 fps. I also managed to sync the shorter episode, though the factor was different (I had to convert it like it was 23.594 fps?): anyone with an idea about this?

Oh and Clever is a really good tool, thanks.

[Quint]

These unorthodox factors are quite common to me. We had this often, especially with anime and cartoon series of the ninetees. Often the PAL sources are correct (just speedupped), and the NTSC sources pulldowned unorthodoxly. Maybe just to save some seconds for commercials? We never found out what was the final reason.

[slowsoul]

These unorthodox factors are quite common to me. We had this often, especially with anime and cartoon series of the ninetees. Often the PAL sources are correct (just speedupped), and the NTSC sources pulldowned unorthodoxly. Maybe just to save some seconds for commercials? We never found out what was the final reason.

On this series, the runtimes of the PAL version change constantly: most are 24 minutes long but many fall into 23 minutes and some. There's no way to find a rational pattern, apparently. The NTSC version, on the other front, runs 25 exact minutes per episode. I suppose there's no way to sync the "weird" episodes properly without knowing the pulldown method used in the beginning?