OMG, what a pain. In between Holiday stuff, I've spent the week trying to convert the main movie (I'm leaving the rest alone) of Building Empire from 25fps to 24fps, then to 29.97fps. I'm just not up to learning Avisynth yet. Perhaps for my Moroder Metropolis project, but I wanted something reliable that doesn't lose any quality (other than the reduction from PAL to NTSC resolution). I think I finally got it. My original version converts from PAL to NTSC in a way that looks very smooth but doesn't alter the sound synch or pitch. Any other style I've used, including the DGPulldown technique makes it look jerky, which I didn't want. I wanted to truly convert from 25fps to 24fps, then back to an interlaced NTSC format and correct the sound. I converted the original PAL VOBs to a single MPG2 and demuxed the audio to a wav, then I used VirtualDub to convert the mpg to avi with HuffYUV lossless codec. This knocked it up to 80GB! I then imported this into Premiere. I then set it to interpret the footage as 23.976fps. The wav was converted to correct sound using Besweet, which turned out pretty good. The vast majority now is corrected of PAL speedup. The feature is now 2:16 rather than 2:11. An unforeseen issue here is that some of the overlaying commentary/interviews were not in PAL speedup, so the occasional voice sounds 4% slowed down. It's a compromise, but for those of us that have seen this movie so many times that we know the pitch and cadence, it seems much better at the cost of a couple voiceovers.

Well, I just couldn't get Premiere to process it right as it insisted upon going from 25fps to 29.97fps. I ended up using VirtualDub again and found a technique to reinterpret the footage from 25fps to 23.976fps and used my preconverted wav. Now I have a second 80GB file. It turned out pretty good, but one side effect was that there's a very quick text crawl in one shot (telling us which actors also appeared in Superman movies) that when it was deinterlaced the first time into the avi got blurred (doubled). I was able to recreate this text crawl with Premiere, but I'm having trouble using Premiere to convert this back to mpg. For some reason, I can't get the Procoder plugin to work right. Right now, I'm using Procoder standalone to convert the avi to mpg2, just to see how it looks. Premiere doesn't reencode back to HuffYUV. I'll probably have to use the Microsoft DV AVI uncompressed codec, but I really don't have another 80GB to spare on my hard drives. I've already used up space with my Moroder project. I've spent the last few days burning DVDs to clear space. I like how Procoder is converting the avi, but I want the corrected text version. I'm going to attempt to even correct the Rouge/Rouge error if I can. Maybe.

Once I get all this sorted, I have to figure out why my DVD authoring is bogging down. It's coming. I just wanted to give an update.