How can I check an NTSC DVD in PAL land?
 

Hey, I'm working on a little international production for the first time and we'll be sending DVD's to people in Europe and the US. I live in Belgium myself and I don't have access any sort of NTSC equipment.

I'm desperately looking for a way to make absolutely sure that the NTSC DVD's I create work in the US without any sort of flicker/framerate hitches.

Any ideas?

(the source material is normal interlaced PAL DVD 4:3)



PS: I found someone who has an NTSC DVD player but a normal PAL TV, can I sufficiently check it on this?

PC/Mac DVD players do not differentiate between PAL and NTSC.

Your NTSC disk does not play on PAL DVD, but plays on PC/Mac = all OK.

Thx a lot for the reply!

Is that really true? Cause I can have a PAL DVD that contains some still images that flicker on a TV but look fine on a PC monitor.

Aren't there more problems like this that can occur that I can't check on PC's?

True, you can not monitor true TV quality without a NTSC player/TV, but at least you can check that you have a NTSC disk.

Funny, I find myself in the reverse situation needing to check PAL formatted DVDs in the States. I also have no PAL hardware. Any more advise on what ya'll have been doing in your workflow to address this would be helpful.

I'm in PAL land, but It's been a fair time now since the big manufacturers put dual NTSC and PAL playback in their kit, but didn't tell anyone. It's now really difficult to find out what is happening when you playback the 'wrong' format. Is it your DVD player that has recognised the frame rate is wrong, and output NTSC at 25fps which the TV has converted back to PAL, or has the DVD been output at 30fps in NTSC and the tv did all the work. I have a vectorscope and scope that gives me a better idea - but having multiple devices that all are 'ambidextrous' makes deciding for certain very difficult. I once generated an entire project in NTSC by mistake - a simple mistake in the editor, and the DVDs played on everything until one day an old TV set refused it - Even the slight differences in screen shape were sorted out by the modern TVs.

heh.. Seems like you guys should set up somekind of exchange program, where you send material back and forth, to check for Pal/NTSC compatibility..

Ok joke aside... Arent the majority of TV's and DVD's both Pal and NTSC compatible now a days? Even my 7 year old Philips 32" has NTSC conversion. (yeah Im in pal land).

My experience has been that virtually no US DVD players can play PAL DVDs, but all PAL DVD players can play NTSC, ditto the monitors.

I have a JVC TM-H150C monitor that helpfully flashes 'NTSC' when I pop an NTSC DVD into my DVD player, so I know it's the right format, AND I can watch out for reversed fields, line twitter, colour weirdness and so on.

Unless you really know a DVD is not destined for a CRT screen, I still find it imperative to check DVDs on CRTs - especially with anamorphic and graphics based projects.

I'm in a similar situation and would like advice. My company is making its first DVD movie (an instructional video) and from the information I've read, it looks like going NTSC will be playable by the widest audience (we're also going region-free). My question is, when an NTSC disc is played on a PAL DVD player and PAL TV, is it truly plug-and-play or will our customers need to tell their equipment how to handle the disc? I'm sure this would vary by equipment, but I guess my real issue is how much of a burden am I putting on our PAL customers by making our discs NTSC? Will the majority of PAL customers not even notice a difference? Or will I get complaints from PAL customers wondering why we didn't release a separate PAL version? Are there other instances of companies just releasing a NTSC version into PAL land? I'd like to get away with just one version as splitting the production run of DVDs into NTSC and PAL will evaporate a lot of profit on the project, but we'll have to do two versions if the burden is too high. Thoughts?

I think NTSC DVDs should be fine in PAL-land as long as they are not region coded.

Note to the rest: old thread alert.

I agree with Emre, I have some pirated NTSC DVDs (sorry, cannot get them legally in EU) that play just fine in PAL land DVD standalone player.