Hi folks, newbie here.

My partner and I are working on a low budget indie film. All filming, editing, post-production will be done here in USA. Our primary target audience is in a third-world country that is PAL-based.

Our target format is as follows:
(1) DVD (NTSC) for viewing/distribution in USA
(2) DVD (PAL) for viewing/distribution in foreign country
(3) An unlikely, but 20% possibility of transfer to film in foreign country


Up until recently, we pretty much decided to purchase the Canon XL2 PAL. But it seems that since all aspects of editing and post is done here in America, we're now shying away from the PAL version for two reason; (1) our chances of transferring to film are low, and (2) to ease the whole end-to-end process for us here in America.


Are we right in deciding to move forward with the XL2 NTSC version? Since our primary output is DVD in both NTSC and PAL, we're going to have to go through conversions whether we film in 24P or 25P.

Welcome aboard DVInfo.net Alec!

Personally I would get a camera that matches my country, so in
your case an NTSC camera. Dealing with a PAL camera introduces
lots of problems (power, light cycles, no native playback etc. etc.).

If you shoot in 24p it isn't too hard to convert that to 25p for DVD.
Hollywood does that all the time for a movie (intrepret the footage
as 25p and then speed up the audio by 4%).

However one problem for you will be resolution (which is higher
in PAL), however depending on your editor it shouldn't be too
hard to upsample that (although it will look a bit more soft etc.).

Thanks for the response Rob!

It's comforting to get validation, so thanks again!

i'm curious... what types of indie films will you be making for the 3rd world countries?