Doctor M's ÜberGuide for -Full- PAL to NTSC DVD Conversion v2.0 — Page 2

Doctor M said:If you ever get too confused, Citizen's aspect ratio calculator is something I really couldn't live without.

Thank you!  I can usually calculate the aspect ratio myself: I was just checking because I have never converted fullscreen to fullscreen before.  In my head, it seemed as if simple resizing 720x576 to 720x480 would squish the picture, as there is no anamorphic stretch invovled, if you see what I mean, but obviously that is not the case.  I think the different PAR for NTSC fullscreen is the factor I was overloooking.

Thanks again! :-)

Hi, I have a suggestion. Instead of using DVDShrink if the DVD goes over the DVD5 standard, after everything is muxed and such, why not use DVD Rebuilder? It seems to always have better quality results. Forgive me if this has been discussed prior and deemed an inferior method.

Oh, sorry I just realized how extremely vague I was being. I was wondering why in Part VII of your guide you recommended using DVDShrink if your final DVD (after muxing and adding menus) turned out to be a greater size than a single layer DVD. DVD Rebuilder normally yields better results in terms of video and audio quality even if the DVD being compressed is more than 5% oversized.

Anyway, it was just a suggestion, and I am admittedly not very tech savvy. In any case, thank you so much for this guide; it must have taken some time and effort to make.

Hello I couldn't think exactly which thread to put this in; however since this question relates to PAL to NTSC conversion albeit a different kind than described here, I thought this might be the best place.
Anyway, I was just making a quick PAL to NTSC conversion for some friends, using the DGPulldown method Doctor M described here in his Reinventing the Wheel thread:

Doctor M said:

Now if you augment this by demuxing the audio and video then using DGPulldown from 25 fps to 29.97 fps and remuxing/authoring you have a different beast altogether.
I saw this for the first time today and thought it was genius, what they are doing is using IFO edit to fool the DVD player into resizing the video to NTSC for you. The DGPulldown keeps the video at 25 fps on the disc but the DVD player performs telecining on the fly up to 29.97 fps for you (no I didn't think that was possible either). The huge benefit is the audio does NOT have to be re-encoded. In fact nothing does. You're just tweaking a bunch of flags and let the hardware do the rest for you.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Hello I couldn't think exactly which thread to put this in; however since this question relates to PAL to NTSC conversion albeit a different kind than described here, I thought this might be the best place.
Anyway, I was just making a quick PAL to NTSC conversion for some friends, using the DGPulldown method Doctor M described here in his Reinventing the Wheel thread:

Doctor M said:

Now if you augment this by demuxing the audio and video then using DGPulldown from 25 fps to 29.97 fps and remuxing/authoring you have a different beast altogether.
I saw this for the first time today and thought it was genius, what they are doing is using IFO edit to fool the DVD player into resizing the video to NTSC for you. The DGPulldown keeps the video at 25 fps on the disc but the DVD player performs telecining on the fly up to 29.97 fps for you (no I didn't think that was possible either). The huge benefit is the audio does NOT have to be re-encoded. In fact nothing does. You're just tweaking a bunch of flags and let the hardware do the rest for you.

Now comes my question: If the PAL disc has an audio delay, when you remux will you use the exact same audio delay? I'm generally awful at calling how out of sync the audio is, so I was wondering if there was a way to calculate exactly what the new audio delay (if there is a new one.)

 

I am not DrM LOL but I have done these conversions a ton of times, when I get my PAL audio and it has a delay on it, for example -67 let's say, I will use DVDLab Pro, DelayCut or whatever you use and correct the PAL audio with the delay -67, then I would use EAC3to or BeSweet\BeLight to slow down to NTSC, then once you convert the video from PAL to NTSC, everything should be 100% in sync, not sure if this is how everyone else does it but it works for me, and knock on wood, I have not had any sync issues at all.

Doctor M said:

The Aluminum Falcon: The method I was talking about there was described in detail on VideoHelp.com.

Thanks for the advice, Doctor M. I got all the info I needed over there, which actually turned out not to be much.

Supposedly it works great for some people, but after trying it on 3 stand alone plays, I had 3 failures.

I really don't recommend that method unless you know your play can do it and you don't intend to play the final DVD on anything else.

Luckily, my friends and I own PS3s. Since this method works well on those, it's my preferred due to it's extreme speed. Also, it seems to work on all my standalones, which is surprising considering the "Patch Method" didn't on any of them.

D_J is right about the better way to do it and how to handle the delay.

 Thanks for the additional info on audio delay, Dark Jedi. I'll keep your method in mind in case I ever decide to convert that way; though, it seems quite a bit longer than DGPulldown...

The video looks squished in Virtualdub because it defaults to displaying square pixels.  Assuming you have resized to 720x480 in your script, all you need to do to make the proportions look right is right click on the preview window and select 40:33 pixel (DV-NTSC-Wide).  When you re-encode, you will use a DAR of 16:9.

Any chance I could add subtitles from .srt files if the original DVDs never had any? I'm converting my PAL DVDs of QUANTUM LEAP Season 2 and 3 to NTSC.

Now how do I go about doing that?

Can I use TMPGEnc to make VOB files? It's NuMenu4U is giving me MPEG2 errors and zero IFO file.