Converting Pal Disc- Audio Not Entirely Copying

[brueso]

I got about 5 discs from a music trader of a music television show recorded off TV abroad somewhere. The discs play fine on my stand alone Magnavox DVD player/recorder hooked up to my TV, but it won't allow me to copy them, which I guess means they are PAL region free discs. I like to copy them to the stand alone because that's where I make compilations from different sources.

 

So, I have copied some of the discs to my Mac using TOAST 10 and after converting them to NTSC, I could play them/copy them to the stand alone player. But for some reason, I'm having problems copying a couple of these discs. For a couple of the discs, the first episode of the two was copied/converted fine- but the second episode on the disc was both shortened (30 mins of a 45 min show) and somewhere around 25 mins or so in, the audio went completely out of sync (not just slightly off- it was as though 5 or so mins of the audio disappeared during the conversion and the result was out of whack).

 

I did a straight copy (no conversion) of the disc and there was no problem.

 

Can anyone think what I might be doing wrong- why the audio might not have fully copied on the conversion discs? Thanks in advance!

 

Bob

[brueso]

Also, I tried to just copy the 2nd episode of the two show discs in the hopes it had something about the discs being too long, etc., but that didn't work either. I played one back and right at around the 15 minute mark on the copy, the audio suddenly skipped 10 or more minutes and then the audio and picture were totally out of sync.

 

Again, when I made a simple copy of the disc, the audio would be fine for both of the programs on the disc- this only seems to happen when I try to convert it to NTSC.

[tsantee]

My best guess is there are dropped frames or timecode breaks that are giving Toast problems. I suggest using MPEG Streamclip to repair any timecode breaks and then save as an MPEG file to use in Toast for the conversion.

[brueso]

tsantee, you have saved the day once again! I used MPEG Streamclip and Toast and all was well. Wow- this problem was driving me insane! Thanks so much for your help!

[brueso]

Tsantee: a follow-up question. MPEG Streamclip repairs the timecode breaks, but I discovered that once I converted the file post-MPEG Streamclip using Toast that there are occasionally 2-3 second gaps in the final product. As luck would have it, sometimes this happens during key moments of the musical performances. Is there any workaround you can think of? It's certainly way way better than having the audio way out of sync like before I was using MPEG Streamclip, but if there's some way to work around this, I would try it. Thank you! Bob

[tsantee]

Tsantee: a follow-up question. MPEG Streamclip repairs the timecode breaks, but I discovered that once I converted the file post-MPEG Streamclip using Toast that there are occasionally 2-3 second gaps in the final product. As luck would have it, sometimes this happens during key moments of the musical performances. Is there any workaround you can think of? It's certainly way way better than having the audio way out of sync like before I was using MPEG Streamclip, but if there's some way to work around this, I would try it. Thank you! Bob

I don't recall this issue coming up before in any of the Toast forums. Is it true that the source is PAL and you're having Toast transcode it to NTSC? I've encountered a DVD that were so poorly mastered that the resolution changed several times in the video. The TV always rescaled it so it wasn't noticeable except for the picture looking worse in parts but when I tried copying it I discovered it was assembled from different sources so it was a real headache for Toast. Toast's encoder presumes everything is the same as the first frame. Maybe the best approach is for you to use MPEG Streamclip to convert the video to a h.264 MPEG 4 and then have Toast encode that back to MPEG-2 when making the DVD. You may be able to tweak the Streamclip settings so it converts the frame rate from 25 fps to 30 fps and rescales the video to 720x480. I know another application that does PAL to NTSC transcoding: MPEG2 Works. It isn't free but it is inexpensive.

[brueso]

TS-

Yes, it's a PAL source. It plays fine on my Magnavox stand alone but it won't allow me to copy it. It is a 'home made' DVD however. The image quality doesn't change (it's pretty much perfect) so it's not the same kind of problem with the disc that you described but for some reason, in the conversion via Toast, those 1 or 2 second gaps happen. At first I thought it might just be one disc but I checked on another from the same series and it had the same issue. The gaps are VERY brief - but annoying. (I haven't watched an episode through to see how often it happens.

 

I will try the other method you described. Thanks again for your input!

[brueso]

Still have frustration trying to make this work. I tried to export the file to MPEG 4 using Streamclip and it said I needed the $20 MGEG2 plug in. I bought the plug in- and it informed me that it only works for earlier versions of the OS. I then tried to convert it to NTSC using MPEG2 works and it treated the disc as though it was protected (it definitely is a home made disc- the menu on the dvd reflects that and the episodes have a watermark burned into them). It seems like I keep hitting a wall with this project!

[tsantee]

Still have frustration trying to make this work. I tried to export the file to MPEG 4 using Streamclip and it said I needed the $20 MGEG2 plug in. I bought the plug in- and it informed me that it only works for earlier versions of the OS. I then tried to convert it to NTSC using MPEG2 works and it treated the disc as though it was protected (it definitely is a home made disc- the menu on the dvd reflects that and the episodes have a watermark burned into them). It seems like I keep hitting a wall with this project!

Sorry this is going so badly. Mac's 10.7 and 10.8 OS includes the MPEG2 component so Streamclip did you a disservice reporting that you needed it, unless you are running OS 10.6 or earlier.

 

I'm wondering if the original DVD was recorded with a standalone DVD recorder. Toast has problems with those. Still, MPEG Streamclip should have worked in that case. I can't think of a reason Streamclip isn't accepting the video from the disc. You may end up just having to watch this one your computer screen. I'm out of ideas.