NTSc or PAL

[Paulce2121]

Hi
I have just started authuring DVD's and I am a little confused, I live in New Zealand and have been making DVD's and sending them to the UK and Austrailia, all of these countries use PAL.
I have been using Ulead 9 and DVD Factory 4 to auther these DVD's.
I have now had a request from a guy in the US for a DVD, I know that the US use the TV format NTSC.
I have selected the NTSC option when I create the DVD, I select NTSC on my PAL/NTSC DVD player and it plays fine, I have tried selecting PAL and the DVD still playes ok, I have the player connected via an S-VHS lead to my TV.
Is the NTSC or PAL formats only used if you connect to the TV using RF, or is it just that my DVD Player is being clever.
Last question, should I be authering my DVD's for the United States using NTSC?
Thank you for all your help and advice
Paul

[FulciLives]

USA only uses NTSC. So you need to redo everything in NTSC. The video and audio and menu etc. as a standard USA DVD player cannot play anything but NTSC and a standard USA TV can only display NTSC.

Some DVD players can output NTSC as NTSC or PAL ... usually they can also do the reverse ... output PAL as PAL or NTSC. It sounds as though you have one such DVD player but such DVD players are far from the norm in the USA.

Most people in the USA don't even know anything about the PAL format.

Thankfully for you it is much easier to go from PAL to NTSC than the reverse.

You need to do some research on how to convert PAL to NTSC ... I can tell you right now that Ulead can author a PAL DVD or a NTSC DVD but don't let Ulead do the PAL to NTSC conversion or quality will suck ass.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[redwudz]

Just to add to FulciLives's post, you might want to become familiar with 'What is' DVD to the upper left. <<<<<<< It has both the NTSC and PAL specifications for compliant DVDs.

[Paulce2121]

Thank you for your speedy help. It has confirmed mostly what we had thought and I think that what you were indicating was that we need to rebuild the mpgs and the AVI's from scratch to NTSC standard in Ulead 9 and then rebuilt the DVD in NTSC format.

Please confirm that we have understood correctly thanx.

[hech54]

My old version of Ulead does infact convert(although slowly) between the two formats. I've only done small clips...nothing like an entire DVD.
You'll need to import the mpeg's or avi's then add another menu after it is completed.
Me?
NOT worth it. Tell the person he will only be able to watch it on his computer OR tell them to buy a DVD Player that converts PAL to NTSC.

[FulciLives]

Thank you for your speedy help. It has confirmed mostly what we had thought and I think that what you were indicating was that we need to rebuild the mpgs and the AVI's from scratch to NTSC standard in Ulead 9 and then rebuilt the DVD in NTSC format.

Please confirm that we have understood correctly thanx.

Correct.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman