moccamaximum wrote:
If your DVD is not mulitlingual (Because FLV can have no multiple audiotracks) and you only want to show the final product to your client, without the requirement that it has absolutely to be played back in a 10+ years old PAL-only Player, you could always go for Webexport(Flash).
If you have never tried it before: at best quality it pretty much is indistinguishable from the real deal.
Flash excport is not a DVD and is not supported on APple devices either so not a great answer. Likewise, this will not play on any DVD players either.
Alex DeJesus wrote:
Sorry mocca, this is WAY over my head. I did not realize I needed PAL menus, only PAL video assets. I thought that if I created an Adobe project in PAL that Encore would encode the menus accordingly.
Neil, I am able to export PAL from an NTSC sequence in Premiere. Or I can create a PAL sequence and cut and paste from the NTSC sequence already edited - without timeline markers, though. This is pretty frustrating stuff to keep track of. And I have no idea it will playback in England.
Hi Alex.
I understand your pain, believe me - and if your client is specifically asking for PAL, then that is what you have to deliver.
Exporting a PAL asset from an NTSC sequence is indeed possible in PPro, but be very very careful as the frame rate differs from the NTSC, and you will have to check playback very carefully to make sure you are not just dropping frames which could result in twitchy playback. (NTSC is 30fps, PAL is 25 - all sorts of room for catastrophe there)
There are settings in the render dialogue that can help with scaling (your footage will be scaled as well) and different render frame rates compared to sequence frame rates.
Just tick the "Maximum render quality" and "Maximum depth" options & cross fingers & toes.
Personally I have had much more success with After Effects than PPro for this type of work - the thing to remember in AE conversions is to be absolutely sure ytou set the option in t he render dialogue to "composition length" instead of "Whole timeline" or whatever it is called (memory fails me right now) or else your run time will change. To explain what I mean, we recently had to create a title where there were 5 film clips, one in NTSC, 2 in PAL and 2 more in 4 and 12 fps stop-frame animations. Without the "composition length" option ticked the thing simply ran out a hell of a lot faster than it should have done but with that option checked, AE just created new frames and the results were great.
Menus also have PAL resolution of course, as well as the different PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) earlier discussed. Scaling these will ruin text in mnore cases than not & t he best approach is to rebuild all menus from scratch - it is actually quite simples in PhotoShop - just open your original NTSC screen, create a new PAL menu template from the presets given and then (after turning off SPHL layers) merge or flatten the original NTSC screen, and then drag the background onto the blank PAL menu, hit CTRL-T (make it a scalable object) and resize to fit your new screen - you may well need to fill in the blanks - and then just drop your button layers in & tweak.
Final option is to check with client & ask them why they need PAL - which I have to congfess raises one question in my mind:
WHen you shot the footage, had you been asked to supply NTSC or PAL originally? If they asked for NTSC, then you should charge them for the reworking to PAL.
However, if they wanted just PAL in the first place then you have to bite the bullet on this one.