corug7 is correct. In addition, many players in Europe can play NTSC DVDs. You may not have to do anything except ship what you already have.

Wow, that's obviously the simplest solution if the player can play NTSC. Is there any possible way to know? Would it be stated on the DVD player?

Also, if I have an NTSC MPG2 video already rendered. if I just drop it into DVDA and set the DVDA mode to PAL, will it re-render it automatically? or is the only solution to go back to the source and re-render as PAL MPG2?

Thanks.

The DVD player may playback an NTSC disc, but you always run the risk of it playing back an inferior image, introducing artifacts into your video, depending on what brand of DVD player it is, what algorithm it uses to convert the video to PAL, etc. Do you want to take that chance with a client?

You may be able to rebuild your DVD in DVDA as a PAL project and convert the NTSC footage during the preparation stage, but you will be compressing material that was already compressed for your NTSC project.

Seriously, if you still have the timeline, re-render to PAL and rebulid your DVD. You will be happy with the results, and I'll bet your client will be too.

Isn't there a region code that must be set as well?

Isn't there a region code that must be set as well?

No. If you don't set a region code (which is the default), it will play anywhere ("region free").

Finally got back around to this....

On one of the projects, I can go back to the timeline and re-render PAL MPG. But one of the DVDs I need to "PAL-ize" is old, and all I have available is the rendered MPG and ac3 files.

So I figured I'd start out simply letting DVDA do the job on that one and see what happens. Opened the orig DVD project up in DVDA and immediately hit the first problem... What is the correct pixel count for default PAL? There are a bunch of sizes: 720x576, 704x576, etc. My NTSC video content was right at 4.7GB. I wasn't expecting to run into size problems. But when I selected 720x576, it tells me my DVD size is now 7.4GB.... i figure I can cut the pixel count down. But i really don't want to send something that looks like dialup-speed windows media video.

Am I just stuck with reducing quality? There's no way I want to split this thing into 2 DVDs. Is it going to be possible to get the same content with reasonable quality on one PAL DVD? Settings?

Help (again).

Thanks.

The correct PAL size to use is 720x576, for full frame. At least that’s what I always use.. this matches the Vegas templates for both DV and MPEG2 (DVDA). I think the 704x576 is the size of analogue PAL. You could the half or “quarter” frame templates (352x576 or 352x288), but I don’t think you need to.

Note that PAL is no larger than NTSC, in terms of file size needed. While the resolution is higher the frame rate is lower, they cancel each other out.

What is probably happening is that the NTSC source files were encoded at a lower bitrate than what is configured as the default in DVDA (which is 8 Mbps, unless you have changed it). I’d guess the DVD is about 90 minutes? DVDA does the math and says if you encode that at 8 Mbps it will be 7.4 GB. Note DVDA seems to often overestimate as well. The simple solution is use “optimize DVD” and select a lower bit rate that fits. You may want to use a bitrate calculator rather than trusting DVDA to calculate… Something like 6.5 Mbps would work.

Back to the point about sending an NTSC disc: Most DVD players here will do something with it. The majority will convert it to “PAL60” – i.e. PAL resolution + colour but keep the original NTSC framerate; and most European TVs will play this OK. The quality will vary. Some DVD players though will output true NTSC – they won’t convert at all. If the TV also handles NTSC than this is fine, but here most TVs do not support true NTSC, so in this case the color is lost. So the earlier advice is correct; it is best to convert to PAL to be sure.

Mark

Thanks so much for the info.

I think I'm going to try my best at creating PALs for both DVDs, but I may just throw in an NTSC version of each one as well, and then get some feedback from the customer as to which one worked best. I don't expect to have a lot of these in the future (this was 2 school events for an exchange student from Belgium who was here in the states and has now returned home).

Thanks again for the education.

Additional question re: creating a PAL DVD -- Spot has a note in his book stating --
" ... AC-3 surround files might not play in all PAL-format DVD players ( ... i.e., older players). PAL DVD authors should use LPCM (WAV) files [if there's a chance it might be played on one of these old players]"

The video I wish to convert doesn't have surround audio anyway (only stereo) so I'm thinking I'll just use the LPCM (WAV) format Spot suggests, as the person I'm sending to tends to keep old electronics gear forever & might have one of these old players. Does this seem reasonable to those in PAL-land? I don't have a PAL player to actually test the DVD ahead of time.

I think the limitation applies only to Dolby 5.1, 2 channel should be fine and a good thing to use if the program is over say 80 minutes.
That's not a hard and fast number, if the video is very clean then you can afford to drop the bitrate and keep PCM audio, else kept he bitrate high for the video and goto ac3 stereo.

I don't think it makes any difference if it is 2 ch or 5.1. The "issue" is that in the original PAL DVD standards, the audio supported was MP2 or PCM - no AC3. In Dec 1997, AC3 was added to the PAL standard. So it is possible that a pre-1998 PAL DVD player may not recognize AC3 (even 2 channel) - though I believe many of those early players supported AC3 even before it became part of the standard.

Today virtually all commercial PAL DVDs use AC3 audio (and this has been the case for many years). So if this person has an old player that doesn't support AC3, then he/she has probably replaced it, otherwise they could not watch most commerical DVDs.

In short, I wouldn't worry about AC3 not playing.

Mark

The initial DVD requirements for Europe only specified/mandated that the player needed to support MPEG-2 and PCM audio. This was modified in late 1997 to also include AC-3 for manditory player support.

--Scott