[HELP] "Real" PAL<>NTSC framerate conversion with speed changing?

[Selur]

However, if the thing I want is a "speed change", then what is a "PAL<>NTSC conversion" to you?

A PAL<>NTSC conversion in general often includes way more stuff since PAL is not always progressive but can be interlaced and NTSC is normally either interlaced or more often telecined content. Also a PAL<>NTSC conversion normally also includes an image resizing since typically NTSC&PAL use different resolutions.
-> a speed change is just a really special case which can be used to do a PAL<>NTSC conversion.

"frame rate mode" is constant. The scan type is progressive.

That makes things way easier.

Could you tell me a bit more about step 2? I was first going to try "With video encoding", but I didn't know what encoder to choose. The video formats I'm currently working with are "MPEG4" and "MPEG4 (H264)" - according to MPC-HC (and my limited knowledge of how to read video file info).
I can't find those in the list, so I guess I'll just go with passthrough then? I'd like the output to be as mostly the same as possible, without quality loss.

MPEG-4 is probably MPEG-4 ASP which can be produced by Xvid, MPEG-4 AVC aka. H.264 can be produced by for example x264.
-> Since you want to avoid quality loss stick with 'passthrough'.

As to step 6, I just went with the settings that corresponded with the input.

Then you need to adjust the reencoding setting ins the 'Audio->Base->Audio Encoding Options->Encoder' accordingly.

As to step 8, I expected the "adjust pitch" option to do the opposite than it actually does. I'd say such an option should restore the original pitch, but instead, it makes sure the audio gets slowed down and the original pitch won't be restored. MeGUI has this option too, and I think the way it works is the opposite there.

Hybrid uses SOX for the audio filtering and the naming is taken from sox.

O, btw, there's a problem I didn't mention earlier. The 23.976 videos I'm using are ripped from an American DVD that uses framerate 29.970. I'm not sure why this is.

And here is where things get more complicated.
If the content is straight from the DVD it was probably telecined. (You should read up on telecine (3:2 pulldown) to understand what most Material on NTSC DVDs is saved as.)

By having done some experiments between rips from the American release and the European one, I can say for sure the videos were originally slowed down from 25 to 23.976. I suppose it was converted to 29.970 after that for some reason.

For the US market. 23.976 (progressive) -> 29.97 (progressive + pulldown) is what telecine is for.
Starting with telecined content some morons use a deinterlacer to convert from 29.97 (progressive + pulldown) to 29.97 progressive when they should have used an inverse telecine method to convert from 29.97 (progressive + pulldown) to 23.976 (progressive). Or the original content might have been a mix of progressive, interlaced and telecined content,... This is where things can get more and more complicated.

It's the way of framerate conversion where frames are duplicated, so the speed won't change. I wonder why they didn't just convert 25fps to 29.970fps directly, so there wouldn't have to be a speed change at all. Anyway, I'm not sure what to do. Can I just set the setting in step 3 to 25.000? Or do I have to do something else? Should I change the input framerate somehow?

You got two solutions (without spending hours of analyzing the content):
a. keep all frames and to a speed change from 29.97 to 25, downside of this is that the pitch adjustment to the audio might be more noticeable due to the greater change.
b. reencode the content and throw out unneeded frames (by using Filtering->Avisynth->Restore->sRestore or Filtering->Vapoursynth->Other->Retstore->sRestore).
Upside of this is that lots of unneeded frames will be removed. Downside is this will require a video reencode which always includes a quality loss (unless lossless encoding is used which would let the file size explode).

-> there are other/better methods which require a lot of knowledge and understanding of the two formats, but the above two are probably the best you can do without having to spend lots of time.

Cu Selur