I had already converted the main film to NTSC, and it looks very smooth, but with no alteration of running time and soundtrack. I was attempting to also convert the main film from 25fps to 24fps while also adjusting the soundtrack to match the new running time. I've successfully converted the soundtrack. The slowed down soundtrack corrects the pitch/cadence issue (mostly-there's a couple instances of spoken commentary and music that was inserted into the PAL already at the correct pitch and speed, so they are subject to 4% slowdown). I used a variety of techniques and was going to try more. Most seem to put in an extra stutter above and beyond the NTSC judder. I just couldn't find a program (short of avisynth-which I'm going to learn) that would take 25fps mpg and take it to 24fps progressive mpg. They all want to take it to 29.97 interlaced. As an experiment, I converted to a lossless avi format so that I could change that to a true 24fps (23.976) then it would be no problem to encode back to mpg without losing any quality. Part of it was actually an experiment for my personal project. I'm doing a recreation of the Moroder version of Metropolis using the restored DVD PAL version and will be doing a lot of editing and frame manipulation. On the conversion (which looks good), I told it to deinterlace the footage and the one side effect was that a quickly running text crawl doubled. I recreated this text in Premiere, but I couldn't get Premiere to convert directly to mpg, so I was looking at rendering back to a lossless avi then using TMPGenc or Procoder to convert that to mpg. There's a 1000 ways to do this and I was trying one that would give me some experience for my actual editing project. I'm sure I would have come across an easy, efficient method. There's plenty of sites out there with advice. I've conversed with DigitalFreak and he's kindly going to do a convert and I'm going to just plug it into my already completed project just to get it done. I was going to run it past him anyway since he has more experience than I do.

Obviously, the best way to view this is in the original PAL, but hopefully this NTSC version will make it available to more people. So far, I've recreated the original DVD pretty damned closely and I'm quite proud of it. Supposedly, there's programs, like NUMenu4U, that will convert menus, but I've reauthored the whole thing from scratch, using only what Jambe has created. I haven't made any alterations (well, one veeeeerry slight one. See if you can catch it.) and I hope Jambe likes it.