With helpful advice from this splendid forum, I have a finished short on NTSC DVD that I'm sending out to several film festivals in North America. I cut it on FCP4. Now I'm finding that some European festivals will accept preview DVDs in NTSC, but require a PAL DVD for screening if the film is accepted.

I imagined it would be as simple as setting the QT output file to the PAL mode and setting the disc in DVD Studio Pro 3 to PAL, plus adding French and Italian subtitle tracks. Then I read the thread herein ( http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=11635&highlight=PAL ) discussing significant image degradation.

Lacking money for a professional conversion or access to a PAL monitor to check quality, will it waste everyone's time converting on my own computer? We're not talking Cannes, just some regional fests that would look cool mentioned in a press kit. Again, I'm out of bucks save postage and cheap entry fees.

Thanks!

Carl Russo

One options is Nattress' standards convertor for $100.
http://www.nattress.com/standardsConversion.htm
Try the demo to see if it works beforehand.

I'm fairly sure you get all of the updates free (unlike Adobe making you pay for the .5 vesions of their software which fixes the bugs in the .0 version).

You would also get really good tech support because Graeme Nattress (the guy writing the plug-ins) provides tech support himself.

In my opinion, Graeme runs a very honest company. Although if you're doing DV for a hobby then it just may not make sense to spend the money on that.

I fully support Graeme as well, he has been a frequent contributor around here. I need to do some NTSC to PAL conversion myself and am not sure that's the way I want to go however. I'm not convinced that the FCP timeline is the best place to do the conversion.

I'm also looking at DVFilm Atlantis, they have free demo as well. I just did one quick test, but was impressed with what I saw and it's an extremely straightforward little standalone program, like their excellent DVFilm Maker.

http://www.dvfilm.com/atlantis/

The great thing is that DVFilm and Nattress both give you free demos so you can decide which fits your needs best. Graeme's Standards Converter is $100 less than DVFilm Atlantis, which is certainly something in his favor :-)

Thanks, fellas. Yes, I'm pleased with Graeme's Film Effects, which gave the short in question "that film look."

Carl Russo

My conversion is done quite differently to Atlantis and will give a very different look, so I'd certainly try the demo of both. Atlantis always de-interlaces footage, which does a sort of film look on conversion, whereas my converter does not, and hence will try to preserve the interlaced or progressive look of the original video.

Graeme