24p NTSC to Pal- render progres or interlaced

musman wrote on 11/16/2005, 9:57 PM
I have some film-originated material that I have removed the pulldown from (making it 24p, or rather 23.976 as I'm NTSC) and have completed an edit. Now I need to make a Pal DVD of the movie. I'm wondering whether to render to a progressive or interlaced mpeg2 setting from Vegas 6 to get the best results. Unfortunately, I don't have a Pal monitor to compare my results. All I can tell on my LCD is that text looks a bit better in progressive than interlaced. Other than that it's pretty similar as far as I can tell.
I thought I read that Pal TVs had no problem with progressive, but as a NTSC person I'm really not sure of anything. I'm leaning towards progressive b/c my timeline is progressive and the text looks better, but I could be making a huge error.
So, does anyone have any advice? Should I render to Pal interlaced (50i) or progressive (25p)? Thanks ahead of time for any help!

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 11/16/2005, 10:42 PM
Generally, you want to render to 25p in this particular instance, but I'd highly recommend choosing some title areas, high motion areas, and high contrast areas and test rendering those.
farss wrote on 11/16/2005, 11:50 PM
Try the approach in the white paper on 24p or rather I think the reverse of it, on this site. You should get a 4% speedup which is nothing and at the same time avoid any frame interpolation.
Your final DVD will be standard PAL 25PsF, think I got the letters the right way around? In other words it's 25fps in 50 fields per second.
The mpeg-2 encoders only encode frames anyway, the player converts them back to fields so the TV can cope.
If you want the very best result then this should have been done when the film was scanned, that way you can get the scan at 720x576 for PAL instead of 720x480 being rescaled to 720x576.
For that matter though, as far as I'm aware 24p DVDs play out just fine as PAL in PAL countries, I've never tried this so it's only heresay.
Bob.
musman wrote on 11/17/2005, 2:08 AM
Thank you both for the help! I've heard a few people talk about the 4% speed up and I think it does bother me a bit as well. How's this for a solution:
1- render out the completed audio
2- in sound forge, add a pitch shift to transposition ratio .96 (actually I could only get it to .95998), selecting a mode like music or speech, selecting preserve duration, then rendering out.

I tested this by opening the file I added the pitch change to back into Sound Forge and applying another pitch shift. This Pitch Shift added a transposition ratio of 1.04, had preserve duration unselected to simulate the speed change the audio will get in Pal land, and it sounded pretty well perfect when I previewed.
So, is this a viable workaround? If so, any suggestions of which mode I should use for the pitch shift?
Thanks again for the help!
farss wrote on 11/17/2005, 3:04 AM
Please don't trust the atonal Bob but I think the general approach is to just ignore the 4% pitch increase. Personally I would have thought it very noticable but it seems not so.
Given thar just running film at 25fps is the standard way to telecine movies down here you should be 100% fine with the vision.
Bob.