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In Reply to: RE: Welcome back :-) posted by Ole Lund Christensen on February 21, 2008 at 10:14:45
*** Remember many of my DVDs are PAL, much better than NTSC. ***
Yes, PAL as a video standard has a higher frame resolution than NTSC, but unfortunately life is not quite so simple.
I have reviewed hundreds of PAL Region 4 DVDs (which are often the same as Region 2 DVDs), and in many cases compared them directly with Region 1 NTSC DVDs.
PAL DVDs theoretically should be better than NTSC DVDs, apart from the following issues, which are rather common:
1. Many PAL DVD transfers originate from an NTSC source. If you freeze frame many PAL DVDs, you may notice NTSC to PAL conversion artefacts - typically combing due to a two NTSC frames being composited onto a single PAL frame (as PAL has a lower frame rate than NTSC).
2. Many (in fact at one stage almost all) PAL DVDs are authored with the progressive flag turned off, which confuses many deinterlacing algorithms. Worse still, some PAL DVDs are encoded in interlaced mode even though the source is progressive. If you have a good DVD authoring tool, you can rip DVDs and inspect their encoding parameters. What you discover for PAL DVDs may shock you.
3. All PAL DVDs authored from 24 fps film suffer from a 4% speed up in audio. Many people, including myself, notice a difference in audio quality caused by this speedup. Even some DVDs that try to compensate for the pitch shift (eg. Lord of the Rings PAL version) introduce additional artefacts from the pitch normalization process (which is audible to people with good ears).
Because of the above problems, I generally avoid buying PAL DVDs unless they are really cheap and I'm not that fussed about quality. I have seen PAL DVDs that look better than the NTSC equivalent, but I have never encountered a PAL DVD that sounded better than NTSC, and sound is pretty important to me.
Follow Ups:
re 1
Often the DVD is made from the film, avoiding this problem. In case the source is the film, the PAL DVD picture is much better than NTSC.
I agree that if mastering is done from a NTSC tape, you get a very bad PAL DVD.
But that is mainly due to the NTSC basic low quality, which cannot be improved.
re 2
I prefer a normal PAL without any "improvement".
re 3. I am sorry, here you are clearly wrong. Not all PAL DVD are like that.
If the recording was done as PAL Video, there are no problems, and the sound is fine too, as it was not recorded as 24 fps. Please try some European sources, like TV concerts.
Some of the pitch changers are very good, some are bad. I spent some years selling these pitch changers. Some you might have missed hearing, just like me, because they hide the rare glitch in a transient.
I own nearly 2000 DVDs, from Regions 1-4.I have compared hundreds of Region 2 and 4 DVDs with their Region 1 counterparts. My reviews are posted on www.michaeldvd.com.au.
Apart from a few exceptions, my experience is that Region 1 NTSC DVDs tend to have superior audio and video quality, compared to Region 2/4 PAL DVDs.
There are a few other sites doing these comparisons. You will find on most of these sites, the reviews concur with my experience. Many include screenshots from the Region 1 and 2/4 discs and you can clearly see the difference (in many cases less macro-blocking, less mosquito noise, less HF filtering, often better colour/contrast for the NTSC transfers).
The reason why Region 1 tend to have better transfers is because of bitrate. NTSC has lower resolution so if both NTSC and PAL are encoded at the same bitrate, NTSC will have less encoding artefacts. Plus, Region 1 DVDs tend to have fewer audio tracks, so the video track is encoded at higher bitrates compared to PAL. A typical PAL DVD tend to have multiple language tracks (English, Frech, German, Hungarian, Polish, ...).
As for the 4% speedup, as I mentioned, this occurs on all transfers that originate from 24fps film. Yeah, there might be a few concerts and documentaries based on 50Hz sources, but these are very much in the minority. If most of your collection consist of these sources, well, good on you. Me, I prefer watching transfers from film.
He seems to agree with me.
Mainly due to the NTSC 3:2 pulldown problem.
Among Pro TV and Film people I have never heard anyone prefer the "Never Twice the Same Colour" format.
So I am puzzled with your experience. Please give a few names of DVDs.
Using two discs reduce the space problem.
The 4% is a problem. But playing back at 24fps solve that.
And Mozart used an A of 422 Hz, not the 440 Hz we often use today. The A have moved a lot in the history of music, and 422Hz is 4% below 440 Hz.
So these is not an absolute A, it is a compromise.
see link for Michaels view on PAL/NTSC
Last two weeks have been fairly busy for me.
First of all, Michael is not my *boss*.
Secondly, I don't quite see how the article implies "... seems to agree with me.". The article clearly states that it depends on many factors.
The point is if you actually sat down and compared NTSC (R1) vs PAL (R2,R4) titles side by side, as opposed to arguing about theoretical differences, then you can see that typically R1 DVDs tend to have superior picture quality to R2/R4. I have previously suggested that you actually read my reviews (there are hundreds on them on michaeldvd).
For additional information, please refer to the following link which contains comparisons, together with screenshots. You will find on most of the comparisons, R1 picture quality wins.
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