Monday, February 12, 2007

PAL to NTSC DVD Part II: The PC Chronicles

So I decided to try the PC workflow of converting PAL DVDs to NTSC to see if its any different.

Overall, it turns out that it is pretty much the same workflow as on the MAC except you don't have to convert the file to a quicktime before you drop the VOBs into Atlantic PC.

So first off, you have to rip the dvd.

I googled for recommended programs and decided to try SmartRipper .

I installed Smartripper with no problems. I ran Smartripper and it started to work on ripping the dvd, but it was taking awhile ripping from the dvd drive. I didn't want to wait so

I opened the dvd drive in Explorer and copied all the dvd files to my harddrive. I ran Smartripper again and told it to look at my harddrive copy of the dvd and let it work on ripping those files.

It worked well and now I had my ripped dvd VOBs.

I opened the Atlantis PC program ( click here )and dragged a VOB into the window. I left all the settings at the default and started the processing. After a little while, I had an NTSC AVI! Atlantis writes the avi into the same folder as the source file and names it newmovie.avi. I opened it in Quicktime, it played, and the movie properties said it is 29.97 (NTSC)!

However, there was large, annoying interlaced blocks whenever there was motion on the screen. It happened throughout the avi. The MAC version of Atlantis worked so well, I figured that it had to be my fault so I opened up Atlantis PC again and dragged the VOB in.

The settings window came up again and this time I looked over the settings. About halfway down the window, I found the solution to the interlacing problem. There is a tab and small graphic that says, "de-interlace where motion is present." I turned it on and voila! no more annoying interlacing in my NTSC avi.

The deinterlace function is pretty handy and you can adjust even more settings in the NTSC/Pal options and Advance Options tabs.

So now all I have to do is take my NTSC AVI's and use a DVD authoring program like TMPGenc DVD Author and burn myself an NTSC DVD...well that's what I'll do after I finally get a network card on my PC.