Is there any chance that someone in the U.K. could find out the catalog number of the new Special Edition of the Battle of Britain movie DVD with the second disc having the complete original Sir William Walton musical score included? I have seen a contest to win a copy in a recent edition of Scale Aircraft Modeling International, but considering what my chances are of winning, I'll settle for the catalog number so I can go order it at Barnes & Noble.
However if you are in the US you will need a multi region player and a TV which accepts 625/50 as well as 525/60 - do US TVs accept PAL via their (whatever you have instead of SCART)?
If you have a multiple format player any TV should work. PAL is the format for Europe while the US uses NTSC; SECAM is used in the Pacific rim I'm told. hth
Australia uses PAL for TV (25 frames per second, 625 lines interlaced) and is meant to be region 4 for DVD zoning.
A governement consumer watchdog has ruled zoning of DVD players is illegal, but fwiw, most DVD players sold here can be made multizone via a "hack". Most dvd players can also play back NTSC coded movies as well... I have a region 4 Forbidden Planet DVD in NTSC - go figure that one out... DVD savvy ppl are quite aware that sometimes region 1 DVDs, for example, are better quality or have more features.
In Oz, we call NTSC - Never Twice the Same Colour..;-)
Yeah, that's the one; or "Never The Same Color (twice.)"
I haven't played with DVD's much. Is it just the players that are zoned according to systems or are the DVD's actually systemized (PAL, NTSC, etc.)? tia,
The players are supposed to be systemised for the appropriate input to their countries television set format, but it seems making a TV with both modes these days is not a big hassle so we sometimes see NTSC movies on R4. As to why some movies are NTSC and not all PAL, dunno, I think movies shot on film itself is 24 fps - don't quote me on that though. It's the only reason I can think of.
That's correct due to the human brain registering images at 1/24th of a second. Early films were done in 20fps which is the reason for their jerkiness. Videotape usually runs 30fps. hth
OTOH, PAL was said to mean "Pay Additional Luxury", as the delay lines and other components used on PAL sets made them more expensive than NTSC sets. And it seems nobody cares enough about SECAM to joke about its meaning...
Folks, let me instruct you on this subject:
First of all, R4 is not just Australia and New Zealand - it's also Latin America (minus Puerto rico, which is included in R1). Most of Latin America uses the NTSC color system (which is associated with the M norm), hence the existence of R4 "ntsc" DVDs.
Second, you may have noticed I typed NTSC for the TV color system and "ntsc" for the DVD format - that's on purpose, as both things aren't actually the same. While the NTSC system is the way in which the color subcarrier is modulated on color TV transmissions (and it could also be PAL or SECAM), the "ntsc" and "pal" designations regarding DVDs are just a form of abbreviating "video at 525 lines and 60 fields per second" and "video at 625 lines and 50 fields per second", respectively. On the broadcasting scene, those parameters are defined (among other things) by the various TV norms (which predate the introduction of color systems, and were standardized at a certain point to prevent countries from adding yet another, different format). As I mentioned before, the M norm is associated with the NTSC system (meaning that, usually, someone using the NTSC color system will also be using the M norm for everything else - and yes, that includes Japan, for which there is a "footnote" in the definition). But a country which had adopted a given norm could use whatever color system it considered the best option for its needs. So, Brazil, while having an M norm TV format, uses PAL as its color system, and is refered as PAL-M. Here in Peru it had been officially decided to adopt the PAL system too, but so many NTSC receivers had already been illegally introduced into the country, that in the end we were forced to adopt the NTSC system. Argentina (and I believe Uruguay and Paraguay too) had an N norm and adopted a PAL system, hence PAL-N. Most of the rest of Latin America had the M norm and opted for the NTSC system too. OTOH, in Europe, there were several different norms in use (A, B, G, H, I, etc.) but most countries chose PAL as their color system. Though they are collectively refered as PAL, it's better to actually call them by their full designation (for example, PAL-B/G for German VHF/UHF channels, PAL-A/I for British VHF/UHF, etc.)
Third (well, actually this is realted to the previous point, but it was getting too long), the DVDs just store the video in a digital format, without any information reagrding the TV color system whatsoever, and DVD players are the ones which actually take that video info and deliver it to the TV set adequately (in fact, they modulate a proper TV signal from the decoded digital data). Luckily, though there is such a wide spectrum of TV norms (which could come in any of the 3 color systems, at least in theory), the ones which use 625 lines all also use 50 fields per second, regardless of any other differences between them, and the one that uses 525 lines (yep, M norm) is the only one that also uses 60 fields per second. So, basically, the digital video only needs to be encoded using either 625/50 or 525/60, and as I said, for convenience, those formats are simply called "pal" and "ntsc".
Fourth, nowadays there are some DVD players available which are not just multiregion but also multinorm, so they can take either a "pal" or "ntsc" DVD and generate the proper output signal for either a PAL or NTSC TV set.
Fifth, the regions are an artificial way some companies decided to screw the users (as if all the various norms and systems from the days of analog video weren't enough already). The official posture is that it was done to avoid cases such as movie X being sold cheaper in country Y than in country Z, thus making users but it from country Y and cutting on the profits from sales/distribution in country Z, but they didn't stop to think of the situation when movie X just isn't released in country Z because there is no interest from the distributor (or no funds, or no distributor whatsoever). Thank heavens for multiregion players... and to a lesser degree, to studios which release movies on multiregion or region-free DVDs (which aren't many).
Sixth (hopefully last), yes, movies are filmed at 24 frames per second, and those are "full" frames (meaning that each frame has the complete picture at an instant of time), while DVDs were conceived for use with conventional TV sets, which use either 50 or 60 fields per second, or, as it's also described, 25 or 30 frames per second - but not only is the frame rate different, but the picture is "interlaced": a field doesn't contain the whole picture, just half of it, and the next one contains another half, relying on the persistence of vision (and of the phosphors on the TV screen too) to "complete" the image, with "odd" fields containing the odd-numbered lines of the image and "even" fields containing the even-numbered ones (line 1 is at the top, line 625/525 is at the bottom; technically, each field has the same number of lines, which means there's a line that is only "half" a line on each, but for simplicity's sake, I won't go into further detail there, I'll just say that the lines in question are #1 and #626/#526). To convert from film, the interlacing is done by simply taking half the picture from the original film frame (even though on "usual" video, both fields aren't taken at the same instant but 1/50th or 1/60th of a second apart), tthe method for adjusting the frame rate varies. For a 50 field per second format, what's usually done is to just accelerate the frame rate from 24 to 25 frames per second, thus effectively reducing the duration of the movie by 4% and displacing the sound half an octave higher. For a 60 field per second format, it's a little more complicated, as you have to somehow put 60 fields where originally there are 24 frames. This is done by a method which is called "3-2 pulldown" (or "2-3 pulldown", depends on whom you take as a reference), which consists of taking 4 frames of the movie and generating a video sequence that consists of: the odd lines of frame 1, then the even lines of frame 1, then repeat the odd lines of frame 1, then the even lines of frame 2, then the odd lines of frame 2, then the even lines of frame 3, then the odd lines of frame 3, then again the even lines of frame 3, then the odd lines of frame 4, finally the even lines of frame 4, and repeat the process for the next 4 frames. So, starting with a sequence of 4 movie frames that is:
1-2-3-4
for a 50 fields per second format you end with 8 video fields:
1o-1e-2o-2e-3o-3e-4o-4e
and for a 60 fields per second format you end with 10 video fields:
1o-1e-1o-2e-2o-3e-3o-3e-4o-4e (or 1o-1e-2o-2e-2o-3e-3o-4e-4o-4e if it's actually "2-3 pulldown")
Nowadays, there are "progressive scan" DVD players whcih feed full frames every 1/50th or 1/60th of a second instead of just even/odd fields, to any TV set that is capable of receiving them (HDTV sets and EDTV sets, IIRC). While with a movie it can be done easily (the player just has to generate a sequence that is 1-1-2-2-3-3-4-4 or 1-1-1-2-2-3-3-3-4-4/1-1-2-2-2-3-3-4-4-4 for 50 frames per second or 60 frames per second sets, accordingly), with material that was originally done in video instead of film, the player has to somehow "fill the blanks" for each original field, since as I already pinted out, odd and even fields are separated in time by 1/50th or 1/60th of a second, and unless there is no movement, they don't "match" for completing a frame. So basically, from a video source that is
1o-1e-2o-2e-3o-3e-4o-4e
they have to generate something like
1a-1b-2a-2b-3a-3b-4a-4b
where, for example, 2a can be calculated from 2o (by just duplicating lines), or from 1e and 2o, or from 2o and 2e, or from 1e, 2o and 2e (by one from several averaging/interpolating methods).
I hope this isn't much of an off-topic and has helped you understand all this mess a bit more (of course, it could also have made the mess worse, let's hope that's not the case).
Anyway, back to the original topic, having heard that Battle of Britain had been released in a better edition for R2 and was coming for "pal" R4 was one of the reasons that finally got me to buy a multinorm player (which is also multiregion, BTW), as I haven't seen any plans announced for an "ntsc" release, neither R1 nor R4...
Man! I never thought what looked like such a simple question could start such a long technical discourse. Thanks for the replies. From all that followed I sort of suspect that if I get the set from over the water it may not work on my VCR.
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