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Guy Burns
Inspiring
February 29, 2024
Question

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

  • February 29, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 2420 views

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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

neil wilkes
neil wilkes
Legend
February 29, 2024

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?

 

 

G
Guy BurnsAuthor
Inspiring
February 29, 2024

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.

 

G
Guy BurnsAuthor
Inspiring
March 2, 2024

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?


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.

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