Thoughts on shoting on PAL
Thoughts on shoting on PAL- special effects and filmmaking
I was seriously considering shooting on a PAL camera which shoots at 25fps instead of the dreaded 30fps...
Must be able to edit it on your PC..what does premiere care where your located...and then convert the finished DV print to tape to NTSC...
Heard that spike lee might be shooting on PAL for his new movie which has DV segments..
well thoughts?
The problem you might have with PAL is it wont work on your television, most Capture cards nowdays can use both PAL and NTSC, but i dont know wheather you can export from one format to another, you might have to get it converted after. PAL is supposed to be 625 (NTSC is 525??) lines of resolution but most of the time it wont get that high.
Dale Jenner
PAL has advantages when it comes to shooting on DV with film as a final destination, because as mentioned it shoots at 25 fps, not 30 (or 29.97, or anything else). 25 is so close to the 24 used for film that a complicated pulldown process is usually unnecessary, which simplifies the process of getting the formats to work together.
If you're not thinking of printing your final project to film, I can't say that I know of any advantages to using PAL over NTSC, unless you have lots of friends in Europe.
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Doug Spice
Mojumbo Jambalaya Productions
Los Angeles, CA
http://mojumbo.n3.net
I'm in the UK, so I use PAL. If you have any specific questions about the format, I'll take a shot at answering them for you. Only trouble is, I'm almost totally unfamiliar with NTSC (I know a little about the format, but I've hardly ever actually SEEN what it looks like) so I can't really make comparisons between the two.
the 625/525 difference refers to scanlines, rather than resolution. A PAL frame is divided vertically into 625 scanlines, NTSC has 525. About 10% of these lines aren't visible on typical TV screens (and some of them don't contain picture signal, they carry other stuff, like Videotext etc). In DV terms, a PAL DV frame is 720 pixels x 576 pixels (NTSC is 720 x 480).
My assumption is that Lee WANTS the video segments of his film to look like video, and, as Mojumbo says, he's going to transfer it straight, frame for frame. You want to put the finished product onto an NTSC tape, which is a bit different. You'll have to resample the image which 1) is a slow operation, and 2) might give you trouble with fringes. The chrominance components in PAL DV are only sampled every other line per field, and with certain colour combinations, you can see "fringes". Resampling so that every six lines become five might accentuate these.
There IS a way to get a fairly close approximation to 3:2 pulldown using normal 60 fields per second NTSC video, but it's a bit convoluted. If you're interested in trying it, let me know what software you have, and I'll see if I can try and explain how to do it...
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