PAL Movie to NTSC DVD

I have a client who has a PAL movie that they need to make a NTSC DVD of for submission to festivals in the US. I have read a lot on this site about PAL to NTSC conversion and all the postings agreed that professional hardware solutions were really the only way to go. However, one posting said if you were going straight to DVD (not VHS or another tape format) you didn't have to worry about this, but it didn't explain what this meant.

I see in compressor that I can select the video output format. If I put my PAL movie in and select "NTSC" in the video output tab of the high quality widescreen preset, can I bring that straight into DSP 2. Will that degrade the quality? Or, would it be better to take it to be professionally converted, then import it and compress it myself.

Thanks for your help.

Steve

Steve,

You can do this, but it will most likely degrade the quality.

Try it yourself. Just compress a small selection of the video you want, create a simple DVD in DVDSP2 and burn to a disc, then watch on your TV. If it looks terrible, get it professionally converted. If it looks OK for your client's purposes, then go with it.

PAL DVD players will play NTSC discs. However, the reverse is NOT true. So if you were to go "straight to DVD" with your client's footage, then it would play fine in a PAL player or a computer, but NOT in an NTSC player.

-Jeff

Jeff,

I have a follow-up question for you: is it true that PAL DVD players can do the conversion "on the fly" to correctly display an NTSC DVD disc on a PAL monitor?

My problem is that I recently authored an NTSC disc for a client and delivered several copies, but the client alerted me just today that two of these discs need to be delivered to Europe for a presentation.

The source material is all originated from NTSC footage at 29.97fps (via DV deck to FCP over Firewire), but it does exist on tape at 24fps progressive as the Panasonic agdvx100 was used to shoot it...

Any suggestions are welcome...


Thanks,

Shawn