burning dvds for the USA

[rob spence]

Hi

I work in the UK and need to burn a final cut project that has been edited in the Pal format.

I now need to put it on dvd for the USA...how do I do it?

 

best

 

rob

[Phil Rhodes]

Any one of a number of ways!

 

Is it interlaced or progressive? If the former, you will need to apply some sort of standards conversion; if the latter, you can interpret it down to 24p and perform 3:2 pulldown on it.

 

There are a million and one options for doing standards conversion either way. You can take it to a postproduction house and have them put it through an expensive box or you can find a software solution (which may be as good or better but slower.)

 

Once you've got your material to NTSC, just make an NTSC DVD. Popular software, such as Encore, offer the choice.

 

P

[rob spence]

Hi Phil,

Many thanks for the reply

the job is interlaced...can you tell me what a standards conversion is please

 

best

 

rob

[Walter Graff]

If it is being made to play only on a computer you need to do nothing other than make sure your burner is set to make DVDs in the US. If it is to play on a TV, you simply need to edit it in a NTSC format and burn it as an NTSC disk.

[Byron Karl]

Unless you Region Code the DVD it will play fine in a standard DVD player. It doesn't really care if the DVD is NTSC or PAL. Meaning you can send your PAL DVD to someone in the US and it will play fine. If there are graphics then they will look distorted and you'll need to make a separate NTSC version.

[rob spence]

Hi Byron,

 

there are captions on some of the live action and over some black backgrounds, these were all produced in final cut pro ( ie no photoshop etc )...will these distort?

 

many thanks

 

rob spence

[Matt Butler]

Here in Australia we are PAL standard. The problem I believe for DVD playback in the US is the fact that most of the actual monitor/TV sets are NTSC.

 

Most modern TV sets in OZ can display PAL, SECAM,and NTSC signals.

 

I went through the whole standards conversion PAL to NTSC for a DVD project and my recipient couldn't play it on their TV set. (NTSC). Must have been a crook conversion.

 

My solution was to send it as a mid rez QuickTime.mov file and they could then play it succesfully on their Mac Cinema display monitor.

 

My question is - are TV sets in the US multi standard like ours are here, or only NTSC capable??

Edited June 14, 2008 by Matt Butler

[Phil Rhodes]

> I went through the whole standards conversion PAL to NTSC for a DVD project and my recipient

> couldn't play it on their TV set. (NTSC). Must have been a crook conversion.

 

I think there's a little bit of confused information here.

 

Just to be clear. A PAL to NTSC standards conversion is a process whereby 720 by 576 images at 25 frames per second are converted into 720 by 480 images at 29.97 frames per second. Rescaling the image is quite easy; unfortunately, making up extra frames is not, and even with the very best equipment this is always an imperfect process. Recent innovations in optical flow interpolation have made this much easier than it ever was, however, and good results can be had.

 

This is an entirely different consideration to the DVD you then put the material on; it's perfectly possible to make an NTSC DVD containing carefully converted NTSC material which won't play on anyone's DVD player, regardless of these other considerations.

 

P

[Adam Frisch FSF]

It's a nightmare.

 

To convert is easy, but to convert and get good, usable results is very hard. I've tried many different ways and have finally given up on getting the quality I need. The best way on the Mac is to convert your 25fps to 24fps in Cinema Tools and the use Compressor to do it. This obviously can take hours if not days for a single clip, so you better be patient.

 

I'm not that patient, so I do a Mpeg2 to NTSC in Compressor with these settings:

 

2-pass VBR

Average Bit Rate: 6Mbps

Motion Estimation: Best

Resize Filter: Better (Best is better, but makes it much slower)

Output Fields: Same as source

Deinterlace: Better (Best is NOT better, as the below article mentions)

Anti-Alias: 25

Rate Conversion: Fast (Best is better, but makes it much slower.

 

There's also a good article here that is useful - as mentioned the the Pal to NTSC conversion pretty much similar to the NTSC to PAL but in reverse. But if you have the extra time, please use the slower method:

 

http://www.macworld.com/article/49306/2006...archcreate.html

[Matt Butler]

>This is an entirely different consideration to the DVD you then put the material on; it's perfectly possible to make an NTSC DVD containing carefully converted NTSC material which won't play on anyone's DVD player, regardless of these other considerations.

 

Thanks Phil,

In regard to the DVD do you mean the quality of the actual disc or the ability of the player?

 

......and are domestic US TV's multi-standard?

[Phil Rhodes]

There are many factors which make the disc playable:

 

- The physical media on which it is supplied

- The software which set up the data for that media; its revision

- The drive it was burned in

- The firmware revision on that drive

- The menu system design, graphics, and other materials that go on the disc

- The video footage and the compressor used to prepare it for the disc.

 

Go to a fully mastered silver disc and you have another layer of fun and games on top of that. Now, this makes it sound worse than it is, and although I have had problems with every one of those at some point, most of it usually just works.

 

But I have now spent about as long typing about this as it would have taken me to do it, so - get someone to do it for you and slip him a few units of currency?

 

P