I was wondering what software people are using to convert NTSC video on their computer to PAL video. I made a few DVD video's for a some weddings in NTSC format that were shown here that I need to convert to PAL format to send over to Europe. I have either the MPEGS or the AVI files to work from so I don't have to work off of the DVD's. I have read about Canopus Procoder, but it is kind of steep for my budget at this time. Thanks for the help and advise, Dezine (Michael)
European DVD players, almost without exceptions, play NTSC films just fine. And all modern European TVs support 60Hz PAL which means that if the DVD or VCR can convert the color coding from NTSC to PAL (99% can), the frequency is not a problem.
I use a ATI Radeon all-in wonder card that will produce NTSC format video from PAL. I can then cut an NTSC format DVD using MyDVD. It works the other way round as well.
Converting NTSC -> PAL is not as easy as it sounds. NTSC typically has 5 frames more per second than PAL. Obviously if you just drop 5 frames every second you'll get an uneven playback. Further the resolution is different between PAL & NTSC and this tends to give you artifacts that look like small rectangles, sorta like mpeg encoding errors, but smaller and not so regular or it "blurs" the pictures. For the framerate problem I've not seen any really convincing software, for the resizing problem the IMHO far the best resizer is in InstantVideo from VOB (www.vob.de).
