NTSC or PAL

[Twizzle]

I have been religiously converting all my films to PAL SVCD and now PAL DVD, but the other day forgot to change and left it as NTSC and luckily found out that it does play on my DVD player.

This has got me wondering now though, if this conversion from NTSC to PAL makes any difference to the overall time. Surely it must make some difference as it is spending some of the processing power changing the fps?

.... or am I just being stupid!

[Nilfennasion]

The answer to your question depends on your source.

When you convert from any kind of film, you will get 20% more resolution and smoother motion by converting to PAL. The downside is that motion will be 4% faster, and the audio will be 4% (about a semitone) higher in pitch. In NTSC, you get your motion and audio at the same speed as it originally was, but the motion will be a little jerkier due to having what amounts to six redundant frames added every second.

If your source material is already in NTSC, you have nothing to gain by converting it to PAL except more artefacts. Leave it as is. This will also save you time.

[thor300]

You will surely lose some quality when converting, most because of the resize when converting DVDs. For AVI it would be less, they need resize anyway, usually. The problem is bigger the other way, NTSC TVs got more problems playing PAL, its not common that the DVD players are the problem.