Comments

Aaron Little wrote on 5/16/2005, 11:33 AM
Just send it to him as NTSC. I have sold several DVDs to Australia and I have never had a problem.
John_Cline wrote on 5/16/2005, 12:17 PM
NTSC is NOT the television standard in Australia, they are a PAL country. However, many newer PAL DVD players and televisions are able to play NTSC DVD's. You might check with your friends in Australia and see if they have NTSC playback capabilities.

John
melbatoast wrote on 5/16/2005, 1:24 PM
okay thanks
biggles wrote on 5/16/2005, 6:10 PM
Many, if not most of the TV sets sold here cope quite happily with NTSC (unless they have a really old set) - just warn them about the black strip that will appear across the bottom of their screen!
John_Cline wrote on 5/16/2005, 7:11 PM
If there is a black strip that appears at the bottom of the screen, then the TV would be displaying the NTSC video at the wrong aspect ratio. Everyone in the video will look short and fat and circles will be flattened ovals. But I guess if you can live with it...

John
biggles wrote on 5/17/2005, 3:24 AM
Hm, maybe I got that wrong - I'll go back and check an NTSC DVD on my TV set!!

Hope I haven't given wrong information.

Well, I checked with an NTSC DVD I had created for a friend to send his daughter in the US (ie the reverse of your situation) and it did indeed fill the whole screen on my Samsung TV set. You live and learn!
xristos wrote on 5/17/2005, 3:54 AM
John Cline''s right...Australia is PAL not NTSC although there are a few lucky people that have a multi system player...not many though...I'm an aussie...take it from me, burn it to PAL.

Cheers mate.
John_Cline wrote on 5/17/2005, 7:26 AM
Fair dinkum, xristos.
saywot wrote on 5/17/2005, 12:57 PM
I'm in Australia and think it prudent to produce your work in the destination format, one of my cameras is an NTSC and I import the footage as PAL and it seems to live quite well with the film from other handycams that record in PAL format
riredale wrote on 5/17/2005, 9:41 PM
I made an 8-minute DVD of an Australian choir singing at the same venue in Salzburg as our Oregon choir. I sent it to their choir director in Perth, and she made copies for all the singers. No one had any concerns about it being an NTSC format, though PAL would normally be the format of choice. I've read that PAL DVD players are NTSC-compatible, and that PAL sets are able to sync to NTSC standards if necessary.
Laurence wrote on 5/17/2005, 10:08 PM
What I'm curious about is which will look better: NTSC footage converted to PAL in Vegas or NTSC played back without conversion on a NTSC compatible PAL DVD Player and TV. Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if the NTSC playback on PAL looked better. I'd hate to think my extra work was actually diminishing the end viewer quality!
riredale wrote on 5/18/2005, 8:22 AM
I would guess that NTSC played on a PAL set would look better, because the PAL set would conform to the scan rate of NTSC. In other words, the viewer would be watching video at 29.97 frames per second, and there wouldn't be any temporal artifacting.

If, however, you converted an NTSC program to PAL and sent that DVD to Australia, then you would have the inevitable 29.97 to 25 frames per second artifacting.

I haven't done any conversions, so I'm out in left field out here, but I recall from the past that it was very,very difficult to convert frame rates without getting obvious artifacts. Could be wrong, though.
Laurence wrote on 5/18/2005, 10:32 AM
That's what I suspect as well. Animated photos and titles would look better because they would be directly rendered into the target format, but the video itself would be somewhat worse. On the other hand, with Vegas 6's improved frame rate conversion, it might be as good.

Vegas 6's 60 to 24p looks tremendous. Doing a 60i to 24p conversion then speeding it up 4% should give an equally good NTSC to PAL conversion. Is there a script that does this? Is this a better approach than just rendering to PAL from an NTSC timeline directly?