This post is one of a number that are a straight lift from the Pinnacle Studio official forum. I orginally archived it when there was a fear the Corel wouldn’t continue to host the older threads regarding Classic Studio when it dropped support for Studio 15 and earlier.
I just now noticed some of my projects are in PAL.
One of them is just credits all made from the titler.The project preferences are set to NTSC.
The video I’m working with is NTSC.Is there a way to bring them back into NTSC so I can put all my
projects together with some being PAL and some being NTSC?I wish that Studio wouldn’t do that to projects (been bit by this myself in the past, and have complained about it for several versions now), but it does. So, I’ll say this again:
The only way to be certain that you’re getting the project format that you want is to manually specify the project format before starting a new project.
If you use the “automatically detect from first clip” method, you may not get what you think you should get in some situations.
This seems to occur when you start a project with a photo.
Many NTSC DVD players will not play PAL discs.
In a new project with the project format set to “set from first clip added to project”, I had a PAL clip open in the album (the old Clowns.mpg in PAL format). The previous project that I had open was a PAL project. I had just changed the format back to “NTSC Widescreen” and then changed the radio-button selector to “from first clip”, then did a File/New)
Nothing on the timeline, but hovering the mouse pointer over the filename above the timeline showed that the timeline was in PAL format.
I then switched to the photo album and dropped a photo on the timeline (using the “Blue Hills” sample photo that comes with Windows XP is a good test that others should have access to). I chose “Standard-Def”.
Hovering over the filename above the timeline now shows NTSC (??)
Switched back to the album
Hovering over the filename STILL shows NTSC, and dropping any PAL video on the timeline shows the green-line re-encode.
So…why did the project choose NTSC? What made it go in that direction? Was it “bleed-through” from the non-selected entry in Project Preferences? Was it because Studio thought I should be NTSC? What makes Studio decide what the project format should be in this situation?
BittMann
This just bit my daughter. She spent the better part of a day making a slideshow for a school project in S12 Ultimate. When I sat down to help her render her output, there were nothing but PAL selections. Checked the project preferences, and they were “set from first clip added to project”. All I can figure is, there was a PAL clip in the album. Now, the clip had never been added to the project, but SOMETHING made Studio decide to create a PAL project.
Luckily, being a slideshow, it’s not going to be such a problem with the framerate conversion. I just hope that the resolution change doesn’t screw things up TOO badly…
Bottom line: This is a problem. It won’t bite everyone, but Studio will sometimes make decisions on its own that are incorrect, and it doesn’t give the user any feedback that this is what it’s doing. If you choose “set from first clip”, you risk being surprised by an incorrectly-formatted project.