PAL/NTSC Redux.......solved?

[RevJim 0]

OK, here's the deal. I did my first balloon jump in Rantoul, and I did it in my BirdMan suit. Cool! Anyway, I had a friend tape my exit from the basket, before he exited. It turned out awsome!

Now the problem. He's french. Yup, a PAL Sony PC series. Well, it firewired perfectly to my TRV 19 (NTSC), and plays on the LCD great! The problems started when I tried to get it off the tape on to my computer, or even a standard VHS tape. It just plain wouldn't work!

Firewire into Studio and/or Premiere? Nope, frozen screen most of the time, and at best it captured 1 frame every 20 seconds or so.

OK, try using the analog out into my VCR. Read above. Same problem.

Straight to a tv? Same problem.

Composite out into my ATI capture card? Same problem.

Same card, input switched to PAL? Same problem.

I came to the conclusion that it plays PAL video internally fine, but the output is NTSC no matter what, and trying to push a PAL framrate out of an NTSC feed just doesn't work.

I figured out a way to get the footage on to the hard drive though, and you won't believe how.

You know that ultra crappy software that ships with the Sony cams? (Well, it shipped with mine) Pixela ImageMixer?

Yea, you guessed it. It works for this. But as far as I can tell, only through the USB connection. This computer only has a USB 1.1 port (not on the laptop), with an Athlon 2400+ (2 gig speed), and a whopping 256 megs of ram, a single 40 gig hard drive with about 25 gigs available, and it didn't drop a frame. The video is juuuust slightly choppy, and I think that can be attributed to the frame rate difference PAL @ 25fps previous to NTSC ~30fps now.

Anyway, I uploaded it as about a 5 meg file or so to skydivingmovies.com, to the Wingsuit section, as Wingsuit Balloon2.wmv

I'll post a link as soon as I know it's available.

Just thought I'd post this, as I know it was frustrating the hell out of me, and then to find out that the super cheap, crappy included software was able to do it the whole time......

grrrrrr

It's your life, live it!
Karma
RB#684 "Corcho", ASK#60, Muff#3520, NCB#398, NHDZ#4, C-33989, DG#1

[Snowwhite 0]

I've been wondering if school has been keeping you so busy that you never get on here anymore, but I guess you have been spending your extra time trying to figure out what ever the heck it was that those last 5 paragraphs meant. If I understand it all, what you said was, you'll have Bman/Balloon jump video from the WFFC for us all to be amazed at soon. Did I get it right?

Miss you! b

skydiveTaylorville.org
[email protected]

[RevJim 0]

Miss you too, B2.

Yep, you got it right. It's only a 25 second or so clip, but it's there!

Peanut and Lucky's wedding is there too, under Misc-Boogies.


October party.....I can taste it!

It's your life, live it!
Karma
RB#684 "Corcho", ASK#60, Muff#3520, NCB#398, NHDZ#4, C-33989, DG#1

[Snowwhite 0]

Too Cool!

skydiveTaylorville.org
[email protected]

[RevJim 0]

OK, It's up.

No big deal, but just showing that PAL-NTSC can be done really simply, and cheaply too.
http://www.skydivingmovies.com/ver2/pafiledb.php?action=file&id=1723

It's your life, live it!
Karma
RB#684 "Corcho", ASK#60, Muff#3520, NCB#398, NHDZ#4, C-33989, DG#1

[mccordia 73]

I just converted some of JP's footage from the Hercules Boogie from NTSC to PAL last night.

If you use the standard Microsoft DV (firewire) capture.
In the capture settings, go to the firewire settings. You can put those on PAL (or NTSC, whatever you want to capture)

You'll still encounter some problems with the different number of fields/lines in the image, but you can easely solve those by deinterlacing the footage.

Some small skipping migh occur (due to the different frame-rate) but there's several ways to also get rid of that if it disturbes you.

I didn't need the audio on the NTSC footage, so I just used the frames 1:1.
Which means that 10 minutes of 30 fps NTSC footage, becomes (slightly slower) 12 minute 25fps PAL footage.
No skipped frames, and a 'free' slight slowmo...which (in skydiving footage) doesn't hurt :)
On PAL to NTSC that would ofcource become slightly sped-up footage...which is less-desirable

Using frame-blending or a retimer plugin in a package like After Effects works wonderfull if you want to keep the org. speed (so the audio still matches up) but there's tons of other options to get rid of the difference in frame-rates. Just play around..see what works best for you...

JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

[RevJim 0]

Thanks Jarno. I would have loved to use the plug in, but my problem started when I couldn't even get the footage to my hard drive.

Is it true what I hear about most equipment over there being able to play both standards? I wish it was like that here in my house. Every time I tried to get a PAL signal through my equipment, everything just froze up.

I was just happy to get it to the hard drive. After that, it's a piece of cake!

It's your life, live it!
Karma
RB#684 "Corcho", ASK#60, Muff#3520, NCB#398, NHDZ#4, C-33989, DG#1

[nacmacfeegle 0]

"Is it true what I hear about most equipment over there being able to play both standards?"
Basically yes, its not true NTSC, but it is watchable.
That goes for things like TVs and VCRs etc, different story for cams. I've had the same issues as you trying to convert NTSC to PAL in minidv format, I've ended up sending tapes to repro houses to have the conversion done professionally, probably not worth it in your case.

There are some software apps out there (Canopus do a system that works with their cards for example)but have never tried them.

--------------------

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

[mccordia 73]

I used a standard EU standard PAL Sony PC8, on a standard PC with a standard Firewire port (no specialized card) on standard Adobe Premiere to capture video from an NTSC tape.

Getting true NTSC video into my PC.
(And then used After effects to convert that into PAL standard)

I've done this before on several PC's.
You don't need any specialized cards, software or anything...just takes some tinkering to get it to work.

JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?

[nacmacfeegle 0]

Yeah, I can import NTSC etc just fine, its converting it to PAL without large loss in quality thats the challenge.
Maybe its the After Effects, I've tried several times with plain old (4.2 and 6.0) Premiere and the results were just horrible, never tried deinterlacing though.
Cheers Jarno.

--------------------

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

[mccordia 73]

If you want to do it with Premiere,
Deinterlacing wil get you decent results. No jagged egdes.
Just a few skips in the footage (30fps/25fps problems)
Which is anoying...

Sucky Premiere fix:
on NTSC 2 PAL, slowing the video down a bit (to +-80% I believe) will almost rid you of that problem.
On PAL 2 NTSC, speeding it up at +-120% also rids it of frameskips (but your footage will be a bit too fast)


In After effects,
import the NTSC or PAL footage, choose to only use one field (even or uneven) so it it's deinterlaced.

Then put it in a PAL or NTSC composite, and choose 'frame blending'
This will generate new frames (when going from 25 fps to 30 fps)
or blend them together (when going from 30fps to 25fps)

When going from NTSC to PAL you can also choose to do direct-frame conversion. Resulting in 10 minutes of NTSC becoming 12 minutes of PAL video (it will become a slight slowmo)
You can do that by importing your footage in After Effects, and just changing the framerate when it's interpeting the footage on import (and again, choose to only use 1 field)


Finaly, on both conversions you'll have to scale the video a bit.
Because PAL and NTSC have different resolutions.
NTSC to PAL 120%
PAL to NTSC 80% (if I remember correctly)

DON'T FORGET TO PUT ANTIALIASING TO HIGH!
PM me if you have questions, that I can help with

ps. Sorry if I came across as a biatch in that last post, didn't mean to...

JC
FlyLikeBrick
I'm an Athlete?