How to Create Both PAL and NTSC DVDs From the Same iDVD and iMovie HD Projects

« Our Christmas Baby Surprise! | Home | My Grandmother is Gone »

How to Create Both PAL and NTSC DVDs From the Same iDVD and iMovie HD Projects

By Greg | January 4, 2007

What do you do if you’ve just finished up a snazzy DVD of video clips of your newborn daughter and want to send them to relatives using both PAL and NTSC video standards? That little pull-down menu to choose PAL or NTSC for your project in iDVD certainly won’t do the trick, and a QuickTime export using iMovie HD expert settings will leave you with a relatively cruddy conversion and lots of work rebuilding the corresponding iDVD project. The answer comes in the form of a simple (and free) utility, plus some careful manipulation of files within your iMovie HD project.

Recently I put together a brief DVD of video clips and photos of my new baby to share with family and a few friends (see “Our Christmas Baby Surprise!”). (Yes, I know this is the sort of thing which probably induces coma in non-family members, but I want to preserve something of these early experiences with her to act as memory triggers for all the feelings that have come with them.) The video was shot in PAL, the video format used in most of Europe and Australia, and burning fully-functional DVDs was no problem. Those would do just fine for relatives in Europe and Australia.

But what about those in the US, using the NTSC video standard? I’d anticipated that burning DVDs in NTSC would be a straightforward matter of setting the iDVD video mode to NTSC (in Project > Project Info…). That would be just too easy. No dice: go to burn a disc after changing from PAL to NTSC, and iDVD pops up with an apparently tongue-in-cheek error message saying something like “It seems we are trying to burn an NTSC disc with PAL video”… In other words, yes, you can change the video mode for the DVD itself, but that isn’t automatically going to convert the underlying video footage from PAL video (25 frames per second, 625 scan lines) to NTSC video (29.97 frames per second, 525 scan lines).

Check the built-in help or Apple’s support site, and you’ll find some convoluted silliness about re-exporting your video footage from iMovie HD, using the ‘Expert Settings’ to configure a QuickTime conversion from PAL to NTSC, and re-importing into iDVD. If you’re a masochist, those are probably the instructions you should follow, since that will result in a low-quality video conversion and produce a destination file devoid of any iMovie HD chapter markers — not to mention a fair bit of reconstruction work back in iDVD. Among other things — like, for instance, that it’s OK to waste hours of time and come out with low-quality video — these instructions seem to assume that you really only want to produce either a PAL DVD or an NTSC DVD, rather than both from one project.

Ugh. That sounds OK for the masochists and single-format disc creators out there, but what about for “the rest of us”?

Alternatively, you might consider using a tool like ffmpegX, which provides a graphical user interface to some very powerful open source command-line video tools, to re-code an entire DVD: start with the PAL DVD, run it through ffmpegX, and come out with an NTSC DVD. But while I do use ffmpegX for certain tasks (it’s the Swiss Army Knife of the video world), and it does those tasks very well, it also bristles with complexity and more than one befuddling bug, not to mention quite a bit of general pickiness. I hesitated to embroil myself in a major ffmpegX experience just to create my DVDs.

Finally, after some quick searching and reading about costly transcoders and the spiffy compressor built into Apple’s higher-end video package Final Cut Pro, I came across the first big step toward a straightforward solution: a simple but highly capable freeware utility called JES Deinterlacer. (The tool is named for its author, Jan E. Schotsman — JES.) It does way more than just deinterlacing! And most importantly for my project, it does PAL to NTSC (and vice versa) conversions particularly well: give it a .mov file in PAL, and presto, it gives you a .mov in NTSC. The only confusion? Neither iMovie HD projects nor iDVD projects are just simply .mov files. So how does this help?

Not to worry. Here’s the crucial couple of steps for making this all pretty easy, rather than obtuse and time consuming…

[OK, the obligatory disclaimer: you and only you are responsible for the results of anything you decide to try that is described here. Please back up everything crucial to your iMovie HD and iDVD project before trying any of this. Beware that something on my system may not work quite the same way on your system. I used version 6.0.3 of both packages when performing the steps below.]

First, quit both iMovie HD and iDVD if they are running.
Then, in the Finder, right click on your iMovie HD project which contains the video you exported to iDVD; choose “Show Package Contents” to reveal what’s inside. Now navigate to “Shared Movies”, then “iDVD”, and you should find the .mov file(s) you originally exported to iDVD to create your DVD. (If you like, you can double-check the name in iDVD’s assets, to be sure you’re looking at the right file.)
Before you do anything else, make a copy of this file by option-dragging it somewhere else outside the iMovie HD project or by copying and pasting the file to a new location. This should be an extra copy, in addition to the backups you’ve already made. (You did read that disclaimer, right?)
Now just hand over that .mov within the iMovie HD project to JES Deinterlacer and let it do its stuff to create a PAL to NTSC conversion. Depending on how you’ve set up JES Deinterlacer’s preferences, you may then wind up with two files, in which case you can delete the original (but not the extra copy or the backup!) and rename the converted file so it is exactly the same as the original.
Now, launch iDVD and open your project — presto, iDVD will automatically detect that the movie asset has been changed and will offer to update your project for you. The software may warn you to double-check your chapter markers, and you may find for example that your clips or stills for the scene selection menu have shifted somewhat. (Just select the clips and manually restore them to point where you’d like.) Now you can go back to that handy pull-down menu and select NTSC as your project’s video mode.

That’s it! Hit that ‘burn’ button, and after the usual rendering process, you should have a fully functional NTSC DVD.

To restore everything back to its PAL state, just remove that NTSC-converted .mov and replace it with the PAL original; open iDVD again, it will update once more, and you can return to the project info to set PAL as the video mode.

These instructions assume you’ve edited your video footage in iMovie HD and exported it directly to iDVD, but it ought to work equally well with whatever other .mov files you may have dropped into your iDVD project: the basic idea is simply to find those source files directly, and convert them with JES Deinterlacer, before re-opening the project in iDVD.

In any case, this probably isn’t the sort of thing you’ll want to be doing over and over in the course of finalizing a project, but if you’ve reached the end and are ready to churn out your discs for worldwide distribution, this is the quickest and easiest way I know to get the job done. Unless you have some pressing need for the experience, I’d suggest forgetting the convoluted advice to export via a QuickTime conversion to NTSC (with all that entails in terms of quality and hours lost) and just aim directly at the source.

Tags: Family and Parenthood, Hannah Sophia, iDVD, iMovie, Mac, ntsc, pal