PAL Encoding... Whaa?
 

Having found a couple PAL DVD movies I've been rather troubled with the frame size. I've only used NTSC material up until now. My usual path has been: source > define > filter/size > encode. I mostly upscale since they're encoded to be watched on a fullscreen monitor (1024x600+). I usually stick around 848x480 or so minus cropping while adding h/w to match up with the specs above.

But how should I deal with PAL ones? Even the height troubles me a lot. Is it really that bad to try and go with NTSC size standards? or should I go for like something x 576?

As for the movies, it's Lion King 1-3, so in other words I'm trying to maintain the best possible quality on a defined size (1GB~)

1024x576 is a pretty standard 16:9 PAL resolution if you want to encode at a 1:1 PAR instead of keeping it anamorphic.

That said most PAL DVD's are utter shit but I guess Disney movies would be one of the few things that'll probably look okay.

Actually yeah Fluff, and that's one of reasons why I've never touched PAL material until now that is.

Cheers o/

Yeah gotta necro for the sake of it. So... Is it okay to resize PAL source to say 704x480 @ 4:3, and converting it to 23.987fps?

If the material was originally produced as 23.976 or 29.97, then the frame rate conversion to 25 will probably have caused a bunch of blending. If you do another conversion back you will have to do some more blending, lowering quality by a lot.

Similarly if the material was mastered at 480p or 480i then the conversion to 576 lines will have caused a bunch of information loss and blending, and converting back will, if nothing else, make it more blurry, and if interlacing has been involved at any point in any form, it will be terrible.

Things are a little different if you have film material that was telecined to 576@25, in that case you might have 576 lines of real resolution, and the framerate might either be a plain speedup, or insertion of one additional field every 24 fields, or it could be a blending. If the framerate conversion isn't a blending then you have material in possible better quality than a 480@29.97 telecine and it would be dumb to downscale it.

tl;dr: Don't do it.
Either the material is poor quality already, or it's better quality than it would be at 480 lines.

Actually the source is 720x576 @ 25fps (DVD), and my goal is > 704x480 @ 23,987.

Not to mention it was recorded here, so I doubt it went through any other processing. It's also 10+ years old...