Progressive (FILM) @ 23.976 fps conversion to 29.97 fps?

[Scintilla]

The script Scintilla gave above is fine. Encode it to MPEG-2 with the correct settings and it will play at the right aspect ratio on both PC and TV. The convention staff will probably want to put it on a DVD at least for backup so a standard NTSC MPEG-2 encode is a good idea anyway.

The tutorial: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/
...was a little ambiguous as to how to convert to MPEG-2. My understanding is that we must export our finished product into an AVI container using the HuffyUV codec. Is this file then just brought into TMPGEnc and put through the settings you have listed in the .png below?

Well, if you have to do any resizing and/or letterboxing, you'll want to serve that HuffYUV file with an AVISynth script and feed *that* into TMPGEnc.

Since EADFAG's section on convention submissions was never actually completed, some time ago I wrote up a guide on encoding to MPEG-2 (or -1) for conventions; it's available <a href="http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... /">here</a>.

Just to clarify, when you say "Flag is a setting in the encoder", the encoder we are referring to is TMPGEnc?

Well, any good MPEG-2 encoder should have the aspect ratio flag setting, but TMPGEnc happens to be the one that most people around here seem to like.

Yay, thank you, I feel like I understand better now. So, does it really matter if I do any initial resizings? Can I just take the footage straight from the DVD and edit in Premiere, and worry about the resizings after the final product is done? Or do you recommend I do what you did, LanczosResize(848,480), and edit in Premiere in that size.

Which of those two choices you use is just a matter of taste. I've gotten into the habit of resizing everything to square pixels before editing because I sometimes use a lot of still images in my videos and I don't want to have to deal with resizing them to make them fit with the video. But keeping everything at the original DVD resolution means there's less chance of loss of fidelity from resizing, because you only end up resizing once (at the end) instead of twice.

Just to clarify, when you edited in Premiere at 848x480, you did not have a letterbox at this point and simply added it to the final product using AVISynth?

That is correct.

[Qyot27]

Just to clarify, when you say "Flag is a setting in the encoder", the encoder we are referring to is TMPGEnc? And thank you for the settings in TMPGEnc, they will help a lot.

Basically, when talking about MPEG-2 (or MPEG-1, amongst others), you have the actual video stream and you have the container. A flag is a piece of information in the container - although in some instances it might be in the actual video data - that tells the playback software or hardware what transformations to apply to it. Aspect ratio flags tell the player to resize the video when played back, a 3:2 pulldown flag tells the player that the video is encoded in progressive 23.976, but to perform a telecine on playback so it displays as interlaced 29.97 and is therefore compatible with your TV (although HDTVs support 23.976 natively, I believe - correct me if I'm wrong here; on a DVD, though, it still has to have the 3:2 pulldown flag to be compliant with the DVD standard).

'Setting the flag in the encoder' is simply selecting the options which tell the encoding program to write a particular flag into the container or video stream, such as was outlined in the picture of TMPGEnc's settings.