Playing PAL DVDs in USA - ??

PeterWright wrote on 5/18/2007, 5:56 PM

One of my clients is going to the US shortly and wants to take a supply of a pilot DVD I edited for her.

I am not sure of the current position - NTSC DVDs play in practically all DVD players over here in Oz PAL land, but is the reverse true? I'd appreciate some local knowledge.

Incidentally, as a contingency I am preparing to make NTSC versions, and whilst rendering NTSC MPEG2s from the original Vegas timeline is the best way to go, I have found the following extremely easy workflow produces quite acceptable results - the quality drops slightly because of the recompression, but still very viewable:

Open the PAL DVDA project.
Save as "Project NTSC.dar"
Change project properties to NTSC (Widescreen 720 x 480 in this case)
Make DVD
- the warning comes up that all the clips will be recompressed, but DVDA does everything.
As a guard against possible artifacting, I have been double clicking to open up every clip and setting Reduce Interlace Flicker to On. ( Not sure if this is necessary or desirable.)
Peter

Comments

filmy wrote on 5/18/2007, 6:14 PM

Most current DVD players here in the US do play PAL disks as long as they are region free. (the disks, not the player) And if worse comes to worse it will play on most all DVD drives in a computer.

Serena wrote on 5/18/2007, 6:37 PM

Computers will play anything (well PAL & NTSC, anyway).

I've prefer to render to NTSC out of Vegas and clients have been pleased with results. The result was less playable letting DVDA recode, but probably I set something incorrectly.

Mahesh wrote on 5/19/2007, 1:59 AM

I have had to do quite-a-few NTSC DVDs recently. I find Vegas does make better conversion from PAL to NTSC.
My work flow has been to render the finished project to NTSC by rendering to new track. This way I can render the MPEG2 in PAL or NTSC ( by enabling/disabling NTSC track ). Do the same in DVDA by swapping PAL for NTSC.
I have not tried DVDA for conversion but Vegas does do a very good job.

Stuart Robinson wrote on 5/19/2007, 9:14 AM

Worth mentioning that while the number of DVD players in the US that support region-free PAL is growing, the average TV is still NTSC only.

I wouldn't take the risk of not being able to play the disc - especially if it's important - and make NTSC versions ahead of time.

kraz wrote on 5/20/2007, 12:52 AM

I have amde both kinds and played in many kinds of players- usually the only problem with playing PAL on an NTSC player is the diff screen dimensions (rows etc.) so in some cases you get a slight squeeze or lose some "outer" letters

Former user wrote on 5/20/2007, 5:59 AM

I just tried on my DVD players and two TVs. Although the dVD player seemed to handle PAL okay, the TVs could not. I would highly recommend you make an NTSC version. Unless a DVD player converts to NTSC, you will not be able to play it.

Dave T2

PeterWright wrote on 5/20/2007, 8:08 AM

Thanks for all the replies - I am making an NTSC version to make sure ...

Peter