NTSC & PAL interchangability?

AFSDMS wrote on 11/30/2003, 8:49 AM

A friend has an NTSC Super 8 home video that was transferred to DVD at a camera shop chain. It is a standard NTSC DVD. He wants to send it to Australia and it brings up the question of whether ti would be compatible. Assuming a region code wasn't assigned and it makes it past that hurdle, would a consumer DVD player in Australia play back an NTSC DVD and handle the conversion so that it would play on a PAL TV? I know the aspect ratio differs and there would likely be a small black bar at top and bottom.

Probably the best thing to do would be to recapture and render through Vegas as a PAL stream, but that is a lot of work where a simple copy of the home video is wanted.

This just brought up a couple questions about the technical issues underlying international DVDs that I haven't had to handle before.

Thanks!

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 11/30/2003, 9:22 AM

Many PAL machines play both. Regionalizing doesn't take into account whether the DVD is PAL or not, it's a question of whether the player will recognize it. PAL players are a lot more forgiving than NTSC players, only because more PAL players play both formats where NTSC players typically only play NTSC.
But yeah, recapturing , if you've already deleted, would be the best option.
You could potentially rip the MPEG, and recompress it to PAL.

vonhosen wrote on 11/30/2003, 9:22 AM

There is no region coding with burned discs, so that won't be a problem.(I shouldn't think it was a replicated disc)

Most PAL players will play the NTSC encoded disc as pseudo PAL (PAL60). Check the documentation for your player. The quality isn't as good as a proper conversion (IMHO).

There is less likelyhood of NTSC players playing back PAL discs.

farss wrote on 11/30/2003, 12:06 PM

Most of the gear down under will handle both NTSC and PAL. Certainly pretty well all DVD players will not have an issue, some of the older TVs might but we regularly play NTSC VHS, VCD and DVDs through quite common consummer equipment. I don't think we even made any special effort checking that it would do it, it's almost a given that they will handle both..

It doesn't do a standards conversion, all that is done on some of the gear is to move the color burst so the TV will lock to it, the TV will cope with the frame rate without much drama. But later still model TVs will cope with a true NTSC signal.