MTS compatibility - PAL & NTSC

Question

Hi,
I've edited MTS footage, which was recorded on a PAL camcorder, in Premiere CS4. I will use Adobe Media Encoder to create NTSC m2v and ac3 files and then burn a DVD in Encore.
Will this DVD be playable on US DVD players, please?
Thanks for your help,
Steve

Answer 1

Hi Steve.
Let's try & break this down then, as I can sometimes be a little windy.
Atlantis usually works fine at default settings, but you are codec dependent and you will need to know how to tweak a quicktime render session to get the best from it as you do not want it spitting out cinepak AVI files by mistake, which is something that can all too easily happen with anything quicktime dependent in the way Atlantis is. When you get right down to it, it is simply a special codec and retimer that plugs into Quicktime.
So you'll need to know what type of codec to tell quicktime to use or you may get degraded output by accident. It's not a bug in the software, just the way Quicktime defaults. The plus side is that once you done this once, you can simply use the "use previous settings" option that Quicktime adds at this point.
Your next problems will come when you cannot get a good transcode with the stock settings - so you'll need to learn how to tweak it. Their support is excellent though as I can personally attest. If you're in a hurry, Atlantis is the way forward..
I'm getting lost in the next bit though. For an NTSC DVD, you simply have to go 720x480 - there is no real other choice (unless we want to get picky & look at MPEG-1 but frankly who cares?). If it is DVD you are making, then you need to tell Atlantis to output NTSC DV or, if you have the Aja codecs installed you might want to try their 10-bit 2VUY mode. Outstanding quality - obscene file sizes though. You would use H264 for the Blu-Ray, but if outputting in the AME you need to tell it it is for Blu-Ray, so that it turns on the right bits you need to make it BD compliant. H264 is totally unsuited to DVD though. The basic rule of thumb to follow when transcoding any files is to try & avoid any data loss that will create quality loss - perceptual encoding. You simplu must use DV at the very least - this is far from ideal (I prefer to use 10-bit files) but you must avoid lossy transcodes as you will still have to use a lossy transcode when you build the final DVD.
I'd advise going from 25 to 24 unless you are prepared to do some awful things to your audio, or else hit the books once more to learn how to compromise either the video or the audio. It's usually sped up, or else every 25th frame gets dropped. Best way to do all of these in software is to take the small amount of time required to learn how to run the scripts in AviSynth, it really is. THese tools use lossless codecs like Lagarith (open source codec, works beautifully) and some well tuned code.
Check the links in Jeff's post above for the tools & the tutorials - it costs you nothing except the time to learn how to do it!