Filming for American and German market

[Craig Seeman]

Certainly PAL compatible frame rate to NTSC transfers are a common thing.

Some might opt to shoot 24p and then speed change to 25 for PAL and Telecine to 29.97 NTSC.

You may need to consider entire workflow, budget and target though. Broadcast vs DVD vs Blu-ray vs Web.

[Olly Lawer]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. My client wants both web and DVD, not blu-ray at this stage, although maybe later.

I planned to film in 720p 25fps. There will be footage from the EX1 and also a PDW 700.

I will edit natively, rending to ProRes and export as QT, then into compressor for the PAL version DVD. What workflow would you suggest for the conversion to NTSC?

Thanks

Olly Lawer

[Craig Seeman]

[Olly Lawer] “What workflow would you suggest for the conversion to NTSC? “
It depends on your budget. Some would argue a good hardware converter would be best maybe like Terenex. Some might do this with video cards. Some can use Compressor or Episode.

[Michael Slowe]

Olly, I urge you to encode your DVD using BitVice rather than Compressor, in my opinion it is a far superior encode and at the same time does an HD scale to SD better than most. The later versions of BitVice also do PAL – NTSC conversions as well as converting the audio to Dolby ac3 files for the DVD.

Michael Slowe

[Bruce Quayle]

Hi Michael,
I am looking for a BitVice-type program that will work in the PC world. Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks,

Bruce Quayle

[Michael Slowe]

Sorry Bruce, I’m not a PC guy, only Mac. Didn’t know BitVice didn’t do PC, good reason to go Mac!

Michael Slowe

[Alister Chapman]

One point to note is that while very few NTSC DVD players will play a PAL DVD, the vast majority of PAL DVD players (I have never come across one that can’t) will play back NTSC DVD’s. So in this particular instance I would simply work in NTSC and produce NTSC DVD’s so no standards conversion would be necessary.

Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com

[Michael Slowe]

My Denon DVD player won’t play NTSC (it is a six year old machine) but also my portable Panny player won’t either. Maybe modern players are more compliant. Also aren’t NTSC pictures inferior to PAL?

Michael Slowe

[Alister Chapman]

Won’t play NTSC or won’t play region 1 DVD’s?

Most DVD players are locked to a single region and most commercial DVD’s such as movies are tied to a region, so if you buy a US region 1 disc it won’t play on a UK region 2 DVD player. However most DVD’s produced for corporates etc won’t have be tied to a specific region so will play in most players. Quite a large percentage of the DVD’s sold in the UK are NTSC region 2 (UK) or region 0 (Anywhere). I have a couple of commercial DVD releases that are sold through Amazon in the UK. These were mastered in NTSC so we have just one duplication run for the whole world. So far I have sold in excess of 2,000 and non have come back as un-playable.

While NTSC is slightly lower resolution than PAL the difference on a DVD is very small indeed. It is NTSC analogue broadcasts that really seem to look bad compared to PAL. A standards converted DVD will most likely look worse than one shot in the native format.

Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com

[Michael Slowe]

Thanks Alister, I’m sure it was a regions thing, this has always confused me although I know I had problems with an NTSC disc recently from a documentary maker which I don’t think had a region issue. It kept ‘stalling’ but it may have merely been badly encoded and burnt. Will BD discs not have this problem or is there still PAL and NTSC even with Blu-Ray?

Michael Slowe