Microfilmmaker Magazine - Tips & Tricks - Converting Between NTSC & PAL Using After Effects

This seems like on of the most asked questions by After Effects users... How do I convert my NTSC video to PAL? Well, the easiest way is to dub your tape from NTSC to PAL. Well, what if you don't have a PAL deck? What if you want to maintain the highest quality in digital format? Here is your answer.

More and more often, I've had to digitize video or create animations for both the US and Europe. I have RE:Vision Effects plug-ins, which make this process really easy. If you do a lot of footage conversion of any kind, RE:Vision Effects has a terrific product called FieldsKit. FieldsKit is a set of plug-ins providing smarter de-interlacing and more workflow options for interlacing and pulldown. You don't absolutely need this product, but the FieldsKit Deinterlacer can build full frames from fields that are of much higher quality than the standard approaches available in most effects and video editing applications. I would also recommend RE:Vision Twixtor, which allows you to speed up or slow down footage. It will help you get a really nice result. RE:Vision Effects software also works with discreet Combustion, Adobe Premiere, Boris Red, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Pinnacle Systems Commotion.

(If you own these RE:Vision Effects products, use this Toolfarm tutorial. If you don't, use the tutorial below.)

Converting NTSC to PAL

Import your NTSC interlaced video footage into After Effects. For this example, I'm referring to footage that is DV footage that is 720x480, 29.97 fps.
De-interlace your footage by using the Interpret Footage dialog box. File > Interpret Footage> Main. Cmd+F (Mac)/ Alt+F(Win). (DV or footage captures from IEEE 1394 FireWire/i.Link are always lower-field first, according to the AE Help files.)

To learn more about determining your original field order, open After Effects Help (Help > After Effects Help). See the article: Interpreting field order.
Drag the NTSC footage to the "Create a new Composition" button at the bottom of the Project Window. Use the PAL D1/DV settings: 720x576, 25fps. By doing it this way, as opposed to creating a new comp, you don't need to set the length of the comp. It just saves you a step.
Open this new PAL comp.
You may notice that your footage does not fill the screen. You can drag the corners to fill the comp or you can scale it, 118.5%,120%.

Here's a great tip from the AE help files: Select the nested comp and then apply the Shrink To Fit command, Ctrl+Alt+F/Cmd+Opt+F.
Click on the Enable Frame Blending button and then turn it on for the footage layer.
Render out the movie using the DV PAL presets, using AE's field rendering set to upper or lower field first rendering, as is appropriate for your project.

Converting PAL to NTSC

Basically you just want to reverse the order of the steps above.

Import your PAL interlaced video footage into After Effects. For this example, I'm referring to footage that is DV footage that is 720x576, 25 fps.
De-interlace your footage by using the Interpret Footage dialog box. File > Interpret Footage> Main. Cmd+F/Alt+F.
Drag the PAL footage to the "Create a new Composition" button at the bottom of the Project Window. Use the NTSC D1/DV settings: 720x480, 29.97fps. By doing it this way, as opposed to creating a new comp, you don't need to set the length of the comp. It just saves you a step.
Open this new NTSC comp.
You may notice that your footage does not fill the screen. You can drag the corners to fill the comp or you can scale it down. Or, use the Shrink to Fit command.
Click on the Enable Frame Blending button and then turn it on for the footage layer.
Render out the movie using the DV NTSC presets, using AE's field rendering set to upper or lower field first rendering, as is appropriate for your project.