Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (
More info?)
Hi Non,
As far as standalone tools are concerned, my recommendation over the
Atlantis would be the FireStore DV Standards Converter (current
version 1.5).
http://www.focusinfo.com/products/firestore/dvconversionsuite/dvcsuite.html
This tool used to be called aDVanced DV PAL/NTSC Converter, which was
sold to Focus who enhanced it (and doubled the price BTW :-( - not
that I don't think the current price is fair or endorse eMule ). But
AFAIK the DV Standards Converter has the best PAL<->NTSC
functionality.
The key to PAL<->NTSC conversion quality is in the field processing,
where you can either ...
a) take and scale the nearest frame or field (like most solutions)
, or ...
b) compute each NTSC pixel / line / field by looking at the
surrounding PAL data in the 3-D space (horizontal, vertical, time) and
take into account how close the various "neighbor" data is to the NTSC
interpolation target.
.... of course there's always "c", and that is ...
c) do (b) plus take motion estimation into account. This way a 100mph
tennis ball that shows up in two PAL fields in different positions
would not turn into two faint balls on each NTSC field, but rather a
sharp ball in the intermediate position (not merely in the middle, but
relative to the timing of a given NTSC field compared to the PAL
fields on the timeline). This is also included on the DV Standards
Converter, but as of th elatest version I do not yet find it
dependable - it does not always converge on the right solution. But
for the short segments where it happens to work, the results are
beautiful. When it does not work, the picture just seems to melt in a
freaky way, snapping back to normal from time to time.
--------------------------------------------------
If you have Sony Vegas Video, a decent PAL-NTSC conversion is built
right in, and works quite transparently. You just specify you want PAL
when you save, or you can have a PAL project from the start and import
NTSC content. I love Vegas Video - switched to it from Premiere (has
nice features of its own), but I just found I was working better in
Vegas, which gave cleaner access to the sort of things I wanted to do,
in the surround audio and color correction space. Everything else
seemed roughly on par, though executed differently.
--------------------------------------------------
There are other methods, mostly geared towards converting DVD's, but
also some decent insight, here on videohelp.com :
http://tinyurl.com/6659z
Hope it helps!
Alec
nonkert@yahoo.co.uk (Non Kert) wrote in message news:<dddf7d3.0409221412.649eff8@posting.google.com>...
> Hi
>
> I have a 3 hr video-film I need to convert to NTSC from PAL DV stream.
>
> Is the software option worth trying? ie Atlantis?
>
> The film has had wide festival release and has to look great as the
> final DVD will cost money. Film was shot on 3-chip miniDV.
>
> Thanks
> NK
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