Pal to NTSC workflow question

[Anonymous]

Hello all,

I work on a Flint 2007 in a busy post shop in Toronto and am expecting footage (that has yet to be shot) from South Africa. The production company claims they can only send us PAL tapes and I am worried about the compatibility complications with working in a PAL project. Are these worries unfounded?

My question is how do most people handle the workflow of original PAL footage if the final delivery is NTSC. Should we do the downconvert with the rushes and expect the whole post process to be NTSC (do we do it with the final tranfser / colour grading). Alternatively, should we wait to do the NTSC conversion as a last step only to create our final master.

To further complicate the matter, all of our existing design elements are NTSC 29.97.

I am sure this is page one stuff for many of you but I am at a bit of a loss and would simply prefer the agency producer to insist they shoot it at 24 and let the transfer suites add the pulldown.

Any thoughts or recommendations for an ideal workflow and things to look out for would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Tod]

Since your graphic elements are in NTSC and you are finishing in NTSC, I would say you should work in NTSC. Are these filmed elements with pull down or are they already progressive? If the former, I think you will need to film compress first, in PAL, so you can get the clips to be progressive, then Timewarp the result to 24fps, export the clips to a file system, then reimport them on the NTSC side. You may need to resize for the different aspect ratio. Do any retouch or effects to the 24fps clips, then film expand them and add the 29.97 graphics. OUtput as NTSC 29.97.

[Debojit Chatterjee]

stillif, thanks for the reply… I don’t know if the filmed elements have pulldown or are progressive (I thought that one of the benefits of PAL was that you didn’t have to deal with pulldown issues?). Regarding the Timewarp from 25 to 24 won’t we lose sync audio in the cuts?

Because I don’t have any of the footage yet, I have no idea what will work and what will be problematic and essentially won’t know until the night before the session.

… should this worry me as much as it does???

What about getting the neg shipped over and pulling new rushes / one lights then we could have the whole pipeline NTSC from the beginning (offline / colour grading / online)?

Just a thought.

[Debojit Chatterjee]

stillif, thanks for the reply… I don’t know if the filmed elements have pulldown or are progressive (I thought that one of the benefits of PAL was that you didn’t have to deal with pulldown issues?). Regarding the Timewarp from 25 to 24 won’t we lose sync audio in the cuts?

Because I don’t have any of the footage yet, I have no idea what will work and what will be problematic and essentially won’t know until the night before the session.

… should this worry me as much as it does???

What about getting the neg shipped over and pulling new rushes / one lights then we could have the whole pipeline NTSC from the beginning (offline / colour grading / online)?

Just a thought.

[Karl Varner]

Is the production company filming 24fps and recording 24fps audio?

If so get them to provide you a frame for frame transfer to PAL. This will play 104% faster than shot speed (in PAL) but that’s okay as once you’ve captured into your Flint, change the TC mode to 24fps, resize to NTSC framing & output to 29.97 with 2:3 pulldown for the offline.
Sound sync, edit and conform as normal.

This’ll be a bit of extra work but ‘should’ avoid issues during the conform.

Otherwise if it’s 25fps PAL you’ll need to speed adjust the audio as well, to match the 25>24 TW. You also shouldn’t need to export/import the footage after TWing. You can change the clips on the desktop.

PAL doesn’t have pulldown (unless it’s a 29.97>25 standards conversion…).
hth,

B

[Debojit Chatterjee]

They shot NTSC…

Thanks all for the advice, I have a greater understanding of the process and various workflows and should be able to troubleshoot in the future if and when we do get PAL footage.

Thanks again,

Paul

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