6 Replies Latest reply: Nov 2, 2012 3:36 PM by John Currie RSS

    Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC

    woodwizer Community Member

      Hi Guys

       

      I suspect this is a frequent subject, but I can't seem to find any rock solid answers.  I am about to record a product demonstration video with Panasonic HDC-SD700 cameras.  The cameras where purchased in the UK and shoot at 1080/50p PAL.  The end product will be a DVD that needs to be easily viewable on USA based NTSC dvd players. 

       

      My question is.  Do I edit with an NTSC preset? There is a 'DV-NTSC Widescreen 48kHz' option, or I usually just use the general setting and choose 'AVCHD 1080p Anamorphic'?

       

      ..and how should I export the final project that will be sent to the DVD replicator company.

       

      I guess a sub-question is, should I be exporting and producing 2 separate formats?  I would rather just have a single batch of DVDs that worked as universally as possible.  But we can do 2 versions if this is easier or more compatible.

       

      I'm using Premiere Pro CS4 (4.2.1)

       

      Would really appreciate some help

        • 1. Re: Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC
          Ann Bens CommunityMVP

          Actually this is not a very frequent question.

          You will have to do some testing before the shoot, as converting pal to ntsc is not an easy task.

          Test shoot in 50p, 50i and SD.

          Seqeunce settings should always match the footage.

          • 2. Re: Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC
            woodwizer Community Member

            Thanks for taking the time to reply Ann.  Testing is pretty much impossible due to mainly not having NTSC equipment here in the UK.  Plus we shoot in 2 days (yeh I know, bad planning).  This was a last minute project.

            • 3. Re: Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC
              John T Smith CommunityMVP

              >shoot at 1080/50p PAL... 'DV-NTSC Widescreen 48kHz' option

               

              I am not 100% sure about this (US only, so no direct experience with PAL) but I do not think you would use a preset for DV

               

              My understanding is the DV option is for standard definition... and you are shooting in HiDef, so would use a HiDef project setting

               

              If that is wrong, http://forums.adobe.com/thread/995779 may help

              • 4. Re: Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC
                JSS1138 CommunityMVP

                not having NTSC equipment here in the UK.

                 

                Pick up an Panasonic GH2 with 14-42 lens (about $800), then apply the "Cluster v7 'Apocalypse Now - DREWnet' 12/15 GOP Soft" firmware hack.  You will not only get an ATSC/PAL switchblade camera, but possibly the best image you can get for less than $5,000 (and probably better than a lot of cameras costing more than $5,000.)

                 

                The point is, if you need to deliver ATSC, you reeeeeally want to shoot in ATSC.

                • 5. Re: Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC
                  woodwizer Community Member

                  Hi

                   

                  Well I ran out of time to research this before I had to shoot the project.  I now have a bunch of AVCHD files to edit.  Jeff Bellune's tutorial seems to be what I need to convert the footage into an NTSC ready format.  However, the process fails halfway through and I think it is because my files are .MTS AVCHD.  I managed to get VirtualDub to recognise MTS files using the DirectShow input driver. But the script in Jeff's tutorial still fails with an unknown error. 

                   

                  I'm googling for alternative methods of conversion to NTSC format, or how to convert the MTS files to AVI so I can hopefully resume in Jeff's process.

                   

                  Any further thoughts?

                  • 6. Re: Editing and Exporting PAL footage to NTSC
                    John Currie Community Member

                    FFMPEG should help. This is not intuitive to start with, the GUI WINFF (or Avanti) may be easier to cope with.

                     

                    The last time I researched VirtualDub/Avisynth can also help, but MTS/M2TS files give problems and requires some complex script commands to deal with timing issues.

                     

                    John