24p vs 25p

chiseen · August 4, 2004

Hi,

I'm shooting a film that will be blown up to 35mm and will be using the DVX-100a. Since I am living in Hong Kong both the PAL and NTSC versions are available to me. I know the NTSC version shoots in 24p where as the PAL version shoots in 25p. Is there much of a difference between the two? Can anyone help here?

Thanks!

Phil Rhodes · August 4, 2004

Hi,

I'd definitely go for the PAL version as you've got a 20% vertical resolution advantage over the NTSC, particularly where you will be cropping to a wider aspect ratio. Also, you can do your entire post as PAL, which gets rid of a large number of niggling audio sync issues. The one frame per second difference is negligible and I think actually it's more desirable to have your cinema release slightly slow than having all your PAL DVDs be slightly fast.

Have you looked at the optical 16:9 widescreen convertors? They have caveats which may discourage you, but depending on your purpose the optical aberrations may be less objectionable than the digital ones from doing your extraction in post.

Phil

Alvin Pingol · August 5, 2004

I second that PAL is certainly the way to go in your situation. The added resolution is enough incentive to use PAL, especially considering you will be blowing up to a much larger format. In addition, I believe that color subsampling is of higher quality in PAL versus NTSC (4:2:0 versus 4:1:1, I think it is).