Re: NTSC to PAL

Try this - it always seems to give me acceptable results:

Bring your NTSC footage in and conform the frame rate to 30fps. Whack it in a comp and double the rate of the comp to 60fps.
Turn frame blending on.

Then drag this comp onto the comp icon and ensure this new comp is set to 30fps. Set the 'Stretch' value of the layer to 200%.

Finally drag this into a PAL comp at 25fps and with the same aspect ratio (ie 4:3/16:9) as your NTSC comps. Open the Stretch Panel and set it to 50%. The duration of this comp should be exactly the same as your initial comp. Use Fit-To-Frame (and check that your horizontal and vertical scale values are the same to make sure you haven't stretched the picture in any one direction). And add a vertical gaussian blur of 1px.

Render out to 25fps at whatever field dominance (usually UFF) your Capture card likes.

Like I say, it has given me great results in the past - effectively you are deinterlacing your films's fields to frames and recombining them for PAL UFF (unless working in DV, in which case, LFF). Give it a whirl, sometimes you get the odd piece of footage that doesn't like this technique, but for other 90% of the time...

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