DVD Production for Worldwide Delivery

[Jo Potts]

Hi all - i have done some searching and can't really find an immediate answer to this.

Basically, i'm going to be shooting the GPC World Powerlifting Championships next week here in the UK on HDV 1080i50 with my XH-A1 (due to me being in PAL land). I shall be preselling DVDs of the event there and then, but will probably be shipping them out worldwide as the competitors are international. Most of them will be Eastern Europe and Russia, with the other from UK and West Europe (not sure if there are any from the US - didn't notice any on the list).

I need to be able to burn it region free so that it works anywhere i assume, but what effect with my framerate have on worldwide distribution?

I'm using FCS2 and therefore DVD Studio Pro 4 for DVD authoring.

Many thanks in advance!

Jo

[Ervin Farkas]

I would stick with PAL DVDs, those will play all over Europe; they will also play in most US players. In case you will have some US orders and the buyers report trouble, then I would re-author, but I forsee no issues at all.

Manufacturers have long forgotten about this Hollywood crazyness and make most players universal.

[Shaun Roemich]

BTW, the default set-up in DVDSP4 is Regions 1 - 6 and 8 enabled with Region 7 being "Reserved", so unless you change these settings in the Inspector, at least your Region setting should allow for universal play back. You can check for Regions in the Inspector window, Region/Copyright tab with the Disc selected in the Assets/Outline window under Outline.

[Jo Potts]

Cheers guys - i was going to keep them all region dvds, just wasn't sure about the framerate issue. Hopefully i won't have a problem!

[Martin Pauly]

Originally Posted by Jo Potts

Most of them will be Eastern Europe and Russia, with the other from UK and West Europe (not sure if there are any from the US - didn't notice any on the list).

Jo,

Based on your expectations, PAL would be the best format for most of your customers. If you do however ship to the US, I would not expect PAL to work there - even today this is still a market that pretty much ignores that things other than NTSC even exist. My experience here as been different than what Ervin reports - I have three DVD players in my house, connected to different kinds of TVs, and the only one that plays PAL DVDs is the player that contains a PAL-to-NTSC conversion (regardless of the region).

- Martin

[Ervin Farkas]

Martin,

I have about as many PAL DVDs as I have NTSC - they all work just fine on all three of my players. Many of my friends bring lots of DVDs from Europe, and I never heard one complain that those DVDs won't play.

By law DVD players in the US are not required to play anything else then NTSC, but most manufacturers leave them "open", meaning they don't block the part of the decoding circuitry that handles PAL.

[Martin Pauly]

Ervin,

That's good to know. The problems I've seen may be more related to the TV sets that I have, and not the DVD players. If the DVD player sends a PAL signal to the TV, that TV needs to be able to understand PAL, right? I've often been told that TVs sold in Europe over the last years widely support multiple standards (PAL, NTSC, SECAM), whereas the same is not true at least for the older, CRT-based TVs made for the American market. I don't have the data to confirm it, but it matches with my experience in my home.

- Martin

[Ervin Farkas]

No, it's not the TV sets; as far as I know, except if you buy some special order TV set, everything off the shelf only plays NTSC. It's the internal circuitry of the DVD players that does the conversion from PAL to NTSC.