Mixing PAL & NTSC

I was just asked to online a FCP 6 project that mixed PAL and NTSC footage shot on DV.
They are having an issue with the PAL footage having a "shaky look."
Does anyone know how to deal with this? Is there a plug-in or an easy fix to this?

A post house suggested outputting the source select shots from the edited sequence (with handles of course) to a PAL tape then having it transferred to NTSC and re-importing it back into the sequence with the other NTSC footage. This sounds like an unnecessary pain in the ass to me. I will have to re-match every shot because it won't have the source time code anymore.

I would appreciate your advice.

Graeme Nattresses Standards Convertor plugin will do a super job of converting your footage without all that shaky nonsense
[www.nattress.com]

Compressor's Advanced Format Conversion is pretty darn good too

If your planning on uprezing you had better check what FCP does with the timecode. The last series I edited did just this with FCP 5 and when we went back to uprez the clips, the pals clips had their timecode scrambled and the wrong part got uprezed. We had to do it manually matching the original footage with the clip. Hopefully its fixed in FCP 6, but I'd check before going too far.

If you're working with such a large chunk of PAL material, you should have converted all of it to NTSC before editing. Because mixing framerates in the same timeline is never a good option.

One workaround, is to copy all the PAL shots into a PAL timeline and send that into Compressor. I gather you're working in DV, so you are already in 'high res'. Then again, the solution of laying it onto tape and having the tape converted should yield faster results (not sure about quality).

Thank you very much Andy, Vince, and Strypes. Your information is very helpful.

This project was just brought to me and I agree with Strypes that it should have been converted from the start. But it wasn?t and now I have to deal with it.

Just so you know, I have not been able to view the sequence and I am only going by what the editor told me. Here is the info he gave me.

The PAL DV footage was captured in PAL DV and then edited in 3 separate PAL DV sequences. Then the NTSC DV footage was captured in NTSC DV and edited in 3 separate NTSC DV sequences. Then they combined the 6 sequences into 1 NTSC sequence and that is the sequence in question. The original 6 sequences still exist.

I would prefer not to go back to the original 6 sequences. So it sounds like the Graeme Nattresses Standards Converter plugin is the fastest and most easy option. Right?

The producer is cool with applying the plugin to the DV sequence as long as it doesn?t change the duration of the sequence and the quality of the shots are not sacrificed. If that becomes an issue we would need to look into Strypes idea of converting it in Compressor. It?s a great idea but I have never tried to do that. Would it affect the quality and duration at all?

Thank you again for all of your help.

Action on some of the frames will be off by minute quantities due to the slight difference in sample points. Expect slight degradation of quality as pixels and frames are recalculated.

Thanks for the info Strypes. So I guess that would apply to both Compressor and the Graeme Nattresses Standards Convertor plugin.

Looks like fun ahead! NOT!