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is NTSC safe in the Land Down Under?
The company I work for just entered Australia, and we are looking for vendors to do non-video relation work for us. One of our execs is heading there this weekend and gave me the assignment of creating a DVD that he can show people that explains what our company is all about.
That isn’t the tough part. I have all of the content. It’s ready to go.
My question is…will I be safe burning an NTSC DVD for him to take? I know that Australia is officially a PAL country, but I have heard that NTSC is becoming quite common there.
Does anybody have any experience with this? Am I going to need to run everything through a standards converter or will I be safe sending it NTSC style?
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10 Replies
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I really don’t know anything about video in Australia but I don’t think I NEED to know anything to answer this.
If I were you I’d send him with an NTSC DVD and a PAL DVD. Simply put, it doesn’t matter if 99% of Australia uses one format or the other…if your guy ends up visiting the 1% that’s different, he’s gonna look bad.
If your company was invited because someone there really wants your product, that might be ok…they’ll go out of their way to make it work since they already want you. But it sounds to me like your rep is gonna have one shot with each of these companies to really impress them. Not having a DVD that plays right will probably sink him with that company no matter WHAT else he says or does.
So give him both. Normally I wouldn’t suggest going to so much troule for redundancy, but in this case it seems to me that the stakes are high enough to justify the extra effort.
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That’s a really good point. It would be worth the few extra hours of my work to avoid looking stupid.
I have Nattress’s (sp?) Standards Converter, so I’ll just dump everything twice.
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a really nice, high rez quicktime file for his laptop can also save your arse…..at the school at, we usually make a high rez qt version, pal, and ntsc dvds….
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do you just burn a quicktime file onto a DVD as data?
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I don’t know about Aus specifically, but in the UK (which is PAL and a commonwealth nation) 99% of any modern DVD player will be play an NTSC disc and any modern TV will be able to read the signal…
I think it’s called PAL-30 mode… or something to that effect. 30fps with a quick conversion of the colorspace.
You could also convert your end media to PAL with compressor and burn a PAL disc with iDVD or whatever.
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Domestic PAL DVD players can play NTSC DVDs. And if the disc id played in a Mac or PC there is not problem.
rafa -
I am in Australia, but what is relevent is the region coding on the DVD. Make sure your DVDs are set for all region playback. Although many in Australia are used to playing region 1 disks with DVD players that are set to ignore region coding, there may be many instances where players are not ‘adjusted’.
If the disk is region free then it will play on all machines here in Australia, computers included. Most of us have monitors that autoswitch to NTSC.
The real question however, is NTSC safe anywhere? I read the daily horror stories here about 3:2 cadence, 24 or 23.98 versus 29.97. PAL is so much easier!
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Oh stop. Don’t go picking on us Americans…. believe me, if I could take NTSC and murder it, I would happily do it right now 🙂
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NTSC DVDs are likely to be OK in Australia, where I am.
Most DVD players should play NTSC, in a conversion mode where it plays back (720×576) PAL at 60 fields a second so that it can be played back on most recent Television sets/monitors. Some don’t have that conversion mode and instead produce true (720 x 480) NTSC at 60 fields per second, necessitating the use of a monitor or TV that will play back NTSC, as many will do. Most modern TV/Monitors will auto-sync to 50 or 60 Hz field rates, some will also do the direct NTSC playback thing. If he needs to project, then most projectors should be OK with PAL at NTSC rates, if not NTSC playback directly.
shopping.yahoo.com.au/b/a/cp_127701_filter_player_type_dvd_player.html will show you that many of the DVD players now on sale in Australia are PAL/NTSC. Of course the player where the DVD needs to be played might not be new.
The other thing to keep in mind is that not all players will play burnt DVD-R disks, so think of a backup scheme that your exec can use if he turns up and can’t play his disk. NTSC/PAL VHS tape players are even less likely to be available, so that is not likely to be a reasonable back-up plan. Two disks are better than one, especially if he is doing a number of talks – leaving the disk in the player at the last location should not be a catastrophe.
Personally I would send him with three disks, two PAL and one NTSC, and the video file on his notebook to be sure, especially if he is doing a lot of shows on the road.
Bill Lee
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yeah, i burned the data to a dvd, and then made sure that it ran on the laptop, just fine.
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