Conversion between PAL and NTSC format video is among the more complicated problems to solve in video editing. If you’ve got a PAL format video you want to play back in the NTSC world, you need to do some complex transformations in order to get a compliant video stream. DGPulldown aims to solve this problem by performing a 3:2 pulldown to convert your existing PAL video at 25fps to an NTSC video stream at 29.97 fps without altering the actual speed of the video in the process. To make the process work, you start with a PAL video source, separate the audio and video with a demuxing tool, deinterlace the video if necessary and resize to 720×480 (standard DVD resolution). Next encode your video source to MPEG-2 at 25fps. Running DGPulldown after this encode step makes the conversion to NTSC at 29.97 frames per second possible. The last step is to recombine the audio and video using your favorite DVD editing app. Not for the feint of heart, but it gets the job done and the result looks better than previous hacks for PAL to NTSC conversion. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]
