Format for PAL/NTSC destined for Blu-ray – SD or HD?

[Guy Burns]

This is a new problem for me, as I've never exported from Premiere in anything but H.264, 1080P.

     The final product of my next project will be a Blu-ray, sourced from a dozen VHS tapes – PAL and NTSC. Each tape will have a separate timeline on the Blu-ray; a separate box on the menu screen to click on.

     When I tried to do a test export from Premiere to blu-ray format, I was surprised at the limitations, mainly due to my own biases. I don't like interlacing, and I assumed I'd be able to export PAL and NTSC as progressive. But no, here are the only options Premiere offers…

• 720 × 480i @ 29.97 fps
• 720 × 576i @ 25 fps
• 1440 × 1080i @ 29.97 fps
  
• 1440 × 1080i @ 25 fps

Before I start editing these videos in their separate timelines, I want to be sure I have the best outcome on disk. VHS, I realize, is shocking quality, and there's not much that can improve it, but I'm still aiming for the best. Of the two options below, which would be preferable?

• Choose a 720 x 576 timeline (or 720 x 480), and therefore I don't need to upscale. Export to "MPEG-2 Blu-ray" format, and rely on the Blu-ray player to upscale and project at 1080P.
• Or choose a 1440 x 1080 timeline and upscale the videos in Premiere to fit the screen. I'd probably choose an upscale factor of exactly two, resulting in 1152P for PAL, and 960P for NTSC. Then export to "H.264 Blu-ray" format, with no upscaling required by the Blu-ray player.

     MPEG-2, from what I've read, requires about double the bit rate as H.264 for a similar-quality image.

     So, do I choose PAL/NTSC timelines, but double the bit rate of the export, taking up space on the disk; or do I choose 1080 timelines, upscale the videos by a factor of two, but export at half the bit-rate? Well, maybe not half, but 60-70%.

     I want to fit all these videos on one single-layer disk, and there might be 7-8 hours in total, thus my concern about bit rates.

     Tests I did years ago on a number of images, showed that doubling the size of a tiff image, and saving as max-quality jpg, didn't quadruple the jpg file-size, it went up by the smaller factor of ~2.5 on average. I assume H.264 behaves in a similar fashion.

     Any comments most appreciated. I want to nail the workflow, before I set up the first timeline.

[neil wilkes]

Your biggest problem here is the way Sony put the whole spec together, as if using 25fps or 29.97fps you simply cannot go progressive scan - to use 1920x1080 you need to be at 24 or 23.976fps.

These are the allowed resolutions (see attachment)

Your next problem is going to be system compatibility. An NTSC disc is probably going to play on a PAL system, but a PAL disc is almost guaranteed not to play on an NTSC system - because of the limitations of displays.

You also do not want to be using MPEG-2 either - you will be much better off using H.264 for Blu-ray as you can get the same quality as MPEG-2 in half the file size, and by far & away the best encoder available for Premiere Pro & Blu-ray export is the TMPGEnc AVC-264 plugin from pegasys

This is built on the far superior X264 engine, which is streets ahead of the lousy MainConcept 264 encoder that is built in to Adobe's Media Encoder.

What are you looking to do - exactly - and what is your source footage please?

[Guy Burns]

Hi Neil,

Aren't you the fella somewhere in the UK, who was inhabiting the Encore forum about 10 years ago? Answering some of my questions about the Star Trek Blu-ray, and lots of other questions? I can't go back and check, because Dumbo Adobe removed the forum.

Compatibility

This project will end up on burnt Blu-rays, so compatibility is not an issue, I hope.

Background

The project is about Hans Vonk, the conductor. He died in 2004, and his wife, Jessie, lives nearby here in Tasmania. She started up the Hans Vonk Music House in his memory (you'll see the photo I took in that Wikipedia article). Late last year Jessie gave me all the VHS tapes she and Hans had accumulated. There are several documentaries that were aired on German TV, home movies, TV new stories, recordings of concerts, TV interviews in St Louis when they lived there, and one or two tapes that are probably the only ones in existence. Their neighbour in St Louis was some sort of TV personality, and did an interview with Hans and Jessie, that I suspect was never produced. It was a one-camera affair, with the personality asking questions off camera. Then Jessie and Hans departed, and the personality faced the camera and asked all the questions that he'd already asked. They would have mixed the two takes together later, for a finished product. But I doubt it was ever finished.

     Most of the material is unlikely to ever see the light of day again. Here's the response from one of the documentary makers:

Hallo Guy Burns,
I am very sorry, I cannot help you, at that time we did not produce digitally and I have no copy of the film.
Toooo long ago.... You could contact WDR [Westdeutscher Rundfunk] and ask there, if they have the film in their archives and could sell you a copy.
Best wishes

Annette v. Wangenheim

Source Material

PAL and NTSC tapes, some original, others professional, the rest are home movies and copies of TV broadcasts provided to Hans by TV stations. It's the 20th anniversary of Han's death this August, and once I've digitised all the tapes, Jessie and I are planning on a public showing of edited excerpts in memory of Hans. For instance, there's a wonderful tape of Han's first performance with a particular orchestra. He introduces the concert, explaining why he chose Beethoven's Ninth. It's wonderful stuff if you're into Hans Vonk. He was asked about popular music during one interview. He was quite dismissive, and was then asked: "What about the Beatles, then?" "Oh, that's different. That's art".

     He's a minor conductor internationally, but a bit of a hero locally to anyone interested in classical music.

Digitising

 So I'm digitising the tapes. What a pain. What a lousy technology in terms of image quality. But they contain history, 7-8 hours of history. At a planned 8mbps, H.264, I'm hoping it all fits on one disk, with little loss of quality. Most of the SD extras on the Blu-ray movies I have, seem to be encoded under that figure.

   Then I'll use Encore to build a Blu-ray and give copies to people who are interested. A few locals (maybe), one or two for Jessie, a copy for the archives in Hobart (and separately on a hard drive, in ProRes 422HQ format), at least one to a musician who worked with Hans in St Louis, and one to a biographer in Germany. An edited version of the Blu-ray, maybe 60-90 minutes, will be shown locally once or twice.

Captures, Timelines, Exports

I've never exported to anything other than 1080P. All this 480i and 576i stuff is new to me, so I want to make sure I end up with the least degradation of the source material. That begins with the way I capture the tapes, and then the way I set up the timelines and exports.

Any suggestions on how to digitise VHS tapes? I've accumulated a thousand dollars worth of equipment so far, more to come, but there may be a better way rather than trying to do it at home.

[neil wilkes]

Hiya right back, and Yup, that's me - I had to stop posting because the Encore forum got killed, and I didn't really have an obvious new home on Adobe who no longer seem to care one jot about replicated media as I know for a stone cold fact that they could easily renew the Authorcore license if they chose to, plus of course they 'sunsetted' the servers they no longer wish to honour - not just Encore forums, but also activation servers, so it is obvious Adobe really don't care at all about their older products which is kinda typical of the hypocritical world we live in, where we are constantly being bombarded with THE MESSAGE and how we need to not eat meat or breathe because 'CO2 = Bad' instead of CO2 = Plant Food, yet ever more streaming and digital this, that & the other is promoted - where do they think these massive server farms get their electricity from?

But as usual, I digress.

As far as digitizing the VHS tapes goes, yes it was rotten quality (Betamax was far superior) but the industry does not care, otherwise DVD-A would have been actually promoted and HD-DVD would have  [abuse removed by moderator] of the sorry mess that is Blu-ray (and yes, I make these things so understand just how  [abuse removed by moderator] they are compared to what might have been if Toshiba had kept their nerve an extra month and Sony had not bribed film studios with hundreds of millions of dollars) but again I digress. You will have to stop me doing this or we will be here all day!

Anyway - digitize and capture at 1920x1080 at 24fps. Don't drop the frames, it only causes confusion and isn't necessary as Blu-ray supports 24fps as well as 23.976, plus these are international standards as well & the discs will play everywhere - you need to forget the whole PAL/NTSC thing ever happened. VHS is analogue, so it doesn't matter what you capture at & to be blunt the higher the resolution the better although I would say using 4K is overkill.

Capture to Quicktime ProRes HQ 422 codec too - do not use the MXF version of ProRes that I believe is only there to confuse the issue in Premiere - you hunt for Quicktime, then select the ProRes HQ codec.

Please email me privately if you need specifics - I will be happy to help.

[Guy Burns]

Hi again Neil,

Thanks for the response. Now for some more technical aspects.

Frame Rates

I'm pretty sure I can't capture at anything other than PAL or NTSC frame rates. I'm using good-quality consumer grade devices (final capture device not yet decided), but even if they did offer frame-rate conversion I wouldn't use it. So, these captures are pure PAL and NTSC.

     The tapes date mostly from the late 1980s through to 2002, and will be a mixture of film-based source material, video as source, and whatever TV stations were using in that era to capture news. The plan is to have three different results:

• Version 1. The unedited raw captures in ProRes 422HQ will be heading to the Tasmanian State archives (if they want them), on a hard drive.
• Version 2. Edited versions of these files (full-length; colour and contrast corrected; cropped; and minor adjustments) will end up on a Blu-ray as separate timelines, probably around 8mbps. i.e. no mixing of sources and frame rates, just the pure NTSC or PAL captures, but prettied up. But maybe I'll just put them on a USB stick at a higher bit rate.
• Version 3. Another version, shown publically from a blu-ray folder (my Oppo player can play folders; saves me burning disks), will consist of the best of the above, coming from a mixture of sources, encoded in 2-pass at 20-35mbps.

Version 2 - separate timelines for PAL and NTSC

You've recommended 1920 x 1080 at 24fps. For version 2, why is that the best option? Most of the original source material was not film, but video, so I'd be degrading the videos by pull down and speed alterations if I choose a 24fps timeline. I think my only decision to make is -- do I use the 1440-wide, or the 1920-wide interlaced options, at 25 or 29.76 fps, simply because there are no "P" options at those frame rates.

Two questions

1440 or 1920 for 4:3 source material?

Blu-ray disk or USB stick?

Version 3

I want to edit NTSC and PAL in the same timeline for this version, but what frame rate do I choose?

     The video that is most dramatic was captured on film, live before an audience, and then sent to NTSC tape. To preserve that at the best quality, I should choose progressive at 23.976 fps, so that if interlace and pulldown is removed succesfully in Premiere, I've replicated the original film source.

     For the PAL material on the same timeline, I'd interpret that at 23.976. The result will be that each particular video has a longer runtime (slowed down), but no frames are dropped. Or I could leave the PAL material at 25 fps, and frames would be dropped. The runtime is now correct, but there is a frame-jump every second.

What's less obvious to an audience: slowing down the entire video, or dropping frames? Interpreting PAL at 23.976 or at 25.00?

[neil wilkes]

Firstly, let's answer the main questions:

1 - Absolutely remain in Full HD - 1920x1080 @ 24fps progressive scan.

Why? to capture with as many pixels as you can use on Blu-ray, or even sub-4K streaming if wanted. You avoid losing any definition as captured, and there is no degradation later from reducing down to Full HD from 4K.

Assuming that there is no music on the video, then I would interpret the PAL at 24fps - this is often done anyway (just check film run-times between USA & Europe for the same edit where one is at 25fps and the other at 29.97/30fps - people simply will not notice, but when it comes to music all bets are off & you need a bloody good FRC. I know how to do this but am not telling on a public forum as it is part of what we do).

Your biggest worry is the audio quality - with music you simply do not want things done wrong, or you will end up with complaints. If things are going on Blu-ray at 24fps then don't even think about drop-frame, as it's really just a way of counting. Stick to 24. All VHS is analogue anyway, so frame rates will be just fine if you capture/digitize at 24 - regardless of what the tape is as it does not matter.

[Guy Burns]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Time now to get serious about the capture equipment. No show without that.

[neil wilkes]

Agreed totally.

I would recommend an S-VHS option if possible, capturing through however you can handle it - a digital bridge of some sort may be the way to go.

What is your computer setup?

[Guy Burns]

Macs, running under OSX 10.9.5 and 10.6.8. I have a few capture devices and VideoGlide software. Also a PC borrowed from a friend, but I'd rather use Mac.