As I have never seen an NTSC DVD playing on a PAL player, I will not argue with your point.

But I can testify right here that the other way around (PAL discs in my NTSC player) the resulting image is just perfect. So my experience is in 'sync' with the general conception that hardware transcoders are better than 95% of all software transcoders.

Same thing with my Western Digital high def multimedia player - I can play anything: 24p, 25i, 25p, 30i, 30p - and the picture on my 57" monitor is just incredibly good.

DVD regions and formats
 

I am confused.

I am in Canada and I use Vegas 6.0 and DVD Architect 3.0 (I know I need to upgrade). My client wants to send promo DVD's to Singapore, India and UK.

Do I need to make them in PAL and Region free? If yes how do I do that?

Thanks

Nitin

Nitin,
Welcome to DVI. Singapore, India, and the UK use PAL as their video format (though I have received DVDs from India that were NTSC, but I digress. Many PAL players will playback an NTSC DVD but the image is distorted. In this thread we were mainly exploring the best method when your source footage is HD (or HDV.) Using this higher resolution footage to export PAL files resulted in no image loss (compared to NTSC SD) and avoided the stretch/squeeze often associated with outputting NTSC to PAL. If you use standard def source you will take some hit on quality transcoding to PAL.

To address the how...I don't have 6.0 installed anymore but I believe it could render PAL out too so I am going to give you generic instructions. When you render your MPG-2 select the PAL profile that matches your footage. In DVD Arch, open your project as a PAL dvd and burn normally after authoring. By default your software should be set to region free. You can check this in the properties options to be sure. Many burners won't even allow you to set region encoding it is more a setting used by duplication houses when replicating. Does this general information help or do you need more specifics?