June 06, 2005

PAL to NTSC, what a pain in the ...

And the long silence breaks today on the blog of the STi studio.

We've been busy...

Aaaaaanyways, I hope there are others out there that can feel my pain with this issue. If not, I can say one thing to all of you out there: PAL to NTSC conversion is a pain and annoying and all that kind of stuff. I've decided to not even bother doing it myself due to the trouble I would have to go through to not only have to get a machine or camera that can play the PAL tape (which are actually quite expensive if you can find them), but then to also have to convert the thing over on my computer.

It is of course very possible to do. There are steps that can be taken with Premiere and After Effects which will in fact turn out not so bad, but 2 hours of material is a bit much and there are some things in life where paying to have it done is worth it over doing it yourself.

The only problem was now how to find a reputable and reliable with good quality work company that can do this. This is the first time doing it here in Canada. I did some calling around and found a couple of places willing to do the work and then quite a few that didn't. It doesn't seem to be such a popular bit of work to do nor in high demand. That doesn't really surprise me and I was expecting it, but it makes me wish that much more that the world would just make one type of format and stick with it. Of course there are more than video formats out there that we all wish would stick with one format the world 'round..

Anyways, I'll be getting my 24FPS converted to 29.97FPS media back on a DVD tomorrow which should be interesting to see. This will give me an idea of the quality of work they can do and how I treat our client material from this point on. Hopefully they're good.. because they are really close and it's quite convenient.

The next problem is that I have no way to see the original video.. so how will I know if there are color or audio problems? Not being able to compare is going to be a bit of a setback I think when it comes to judging the quality of the conversion.

Anybody else out there that has dealt with this problem? What did you do?

Posted by Graeme at June 6, 2005 10:30 AM
　



Comments

I think the fastest way to transfer PAL to NTSC is to have this job done by professionals. There are really plenty of companies that are capable to do this job for a reasonable fee. Please comment your impressions about the work done to you, okay? Thanks.

Posted by: Roger Nelson at June 10, 2005 01:44 AM

I agree, it was a generally painless process other than converting the DVD that they gave me over to AVI so I could bring it into Premiere to edit.

I asked how much they would charge me to do that, and they said from miniDV tape to AVI with pal to ntsc conversion is about 200 bucks... That's way more than just getting it onto a DVD and me converting it. Though I do realize that the quality might be a bit better.

Posted by: Graeme Bull at June 10, 2005 01:56 AM