Re: One DVD for PAL & NTSC countries

If you master in PAL, the player would have to be Multiformat in the NTSC country, as well as the TV or display playing it. That's quite a risk to take, and I wouldn't recommend it.

If you master your disk at 23.98p however, it will be interlaced by the player to either 30 or 25 interlaced fps. This is how Hollywood films are mastered (23.98p is the video equivalent of 24p used in cinema with a small conform to alter the speed a fraction) - and means your project will play fine in either region. A progressive DVD player (most of them these days) will even give a better picture via Component or RGB scart. This noticeably improves the quality of your DVDs (which are pretty shoddy otherwise).

This is a great solution if you have not mastered or shot yet. If you've already shot video at 50i (25fps) then you should get a conversion made (or use something like Natress's standards converter) to an NTSC frame rate, and re-encode the disk for NTSC regions.

Ben

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