Converting NTSC to PAL

[Alain J Francois]

:blink: OK We have just shot a film on S16 all well and good. Telecine onto DigiBeta cam and transfer to miniDV for the offline. After a lot of hard work, and mysterious dropped frames, black holes and media that constantly required re-rendering, we discover that some cluts has pressed the wrong button at the start and all of the PAL footage was edited into NTSC format. Platform used was Final cut pro HD. Obviously the post production facility had a mini fit when they tried to match the EDLS.

We tried to convert the footage back to PAL and found that the computer wants to keep the same frame rate as NTSC (ie 29.98 fps), which makes it impossible to write to tape as the machine keeps waiting for a PAL signal.

Is there a way of converting the NTSC footage to PAL at 25 fps without major loss of media, time coding, or anything else of importance? Basically we need to try to get the online as soon as possible. Obviously re-editing all of the footage is an option but a costly one at this point. Help please.

[Keith Mottram]

:blink: OK We have just shot a film on S16 all well and good. Telecine onto DigiBeta cam and transfer to miniDV for the offline. After a lot of hard work, and mysterious dropped frames, black holes and media that constantly required re-rendering, we discover that some cluts has pressed the wrong button at the start and all of the PAL footage was edited into NTSC format. Platform used was Final cut pro HD. Obviously the post production facility had a mini fit when they tried to match the EDLS.

We tried to convert the footage back to PAL and found that the computer wants to keep the same frame rate as NTSC (ie 29.98 fps), which makes it impossible to write to tape as the machine keeps waiting for a PAL signal.

Is there a way of converting the NTSC footage to PAL at 25 fps without major loss of media, time coding, or anything else of importance? Basically we need to try to get the online as soon as possible. Obviously re-editing all of the footage is an option but a costly one at this point. Help please.

 

Bit confused by this- the footaged was TK'd to PAL? If this is the case it would have been digitised as PAL and this would mean that you would have to render every shot in the timeline for every edit. This wouldn't just send out alarm bells it would send out sirens. So are you sure it wasn't accidentally edited at and TK'd at NTSC?

 

If you just wanted to go to a PAL tape from a NTSC cut, then the easiest way is to export the timeline as a ref movie- reimport and then render the clip in a PAL timeline. You will then be able to output. If this is an acceptable way of going to online (which I doubt) then if you can find a copy of shake 4 and retime the QT in that the conversion is excellent but you will need to allow time for the render.

 

If you tell me how you want to have this finished (neg cut, HD, PAL SD output etc) I can tell you the necessary work around.

 

Keith

[Alain J Francois]

Bit confused by this- the footaged was TK'd to PAL? If this is the case it would have been digitised as PAL and this would mean that you would have to render every shot in the timeline for every edit. This wouldn't just send out alarm bells it would send out sirens. So are you sure it wasn't accidentally edited at and TK'd at NTSC?

 

If you just wanted to go to a PAL tape from a NTSC cut, then the easiest way is to export the timeline as a ref movie- reimport and then render the clip in a PAL timeline. You will then be able to output. If this is an acceptable way of going to online (which I doubt) then if you can find a copy of shake 4 and retime the QT in that the conversion is excellent but you will need to allow time for the render.

 

If you tell me how you want to have this finished (neg cut, HD, PAL SD output etc) I can tell you the necessary work around.

 

Keith

 

Keith - thank you for taking the time to respond and thank you for your suggestions. We will try these. Yes the alarm bells did sound, but neither of us were experienced enough to realise what the cause of re-rendering each edit was. The techs at Uni were not helpful either (don't know why) all we were aware of was that we had a fairly major problem - we had to dig around ourselves to find out the cause . Thanks to this site we are able to go some way to resolve this problem. Alain.

Edited December 24, 2005 by Alain J. Francois