Hi,

I'm currently in the market for the Panasonic GS500, only thing is, the English PAL camera prices are crazy in comparison to the US NTSC prices, pretty much double..

I've got a mac and plan on shooting and editing short films on my uni course next year (this why I'm looking to save £££), so plugging into TV and playing straight isn't something I'm looking at doing anyway.. but question is this..

- Will I be able to burn onto DVD and play w/o any probs? (do most DVD players these days cater to both formats?)

- If it does have to burn PAL region DVD format, how much will the video quality be compromised?

Cheers.

[mudstuff]

PAL is better quality than NTSC so you wouldn't lose any quality. Also making a DVD to play in a standalone normally would not lock it to any region though there are programs that will allow you to specify a region should you want to. Pretty much all equipment these days is multi-standard so you should not have a problem playing back on any TV or PC etc.

Have you considered import costs and customs tax? Just because something is much cheaper in the US doesn't mean you actually get it for that price after customs plus you would normally need to return it to the states if something went wrong. I'd have a good look around online and try and buy a UK one or an NTSC one from a UK source so the price you see is the price you pay and you have a reliable return process should something go wrong.

[jaymac]

Most editors allow you to burn as either pal or ntsc

[rhubarbe]

I'm sure they do, because they are going to be sold in both PAL and NTSC countries. But that doesn't mean that you can capture 30fps NTSC footage,prees a button and out will come uncompromised 25fps PAL footage. It won't. It'll have to be converted and you'll inevitably lose quality.

In general, it is OK to use an NTSC High Definition camcorder in PAL countris as long as you have an HDTV because that will accept both types of signal.

But it's a brave man who'll use a standard definition NTSC cam with SD PAL TVs.

It's just more trouble than it's worth.

[akkers]

If you want to share videos and ant to be certain it will play all PAL tvs then you have to convert to PAL which is a nightmare. Even when you do convert NTSC to PAL successfuly the resulting footage looks poor because it has several frames/sec. stripped out.

[glesgaguyav]

It's faulse economy to by an NTSC cam for use in a PAL country.

All your footage will be locked into the NTSC format and should you possibly wish to incorporate footage from other sources when editing your projects for your course then these will have to be NTSC.

To convert NTSC to PAL in software is not easy, results can vary widely and as has been said before there will be a loss of quality, especially if you have fast moving footage (pans/zooms/moving objects), it will just look horrible.

Best buy PAL especially if it's for a Uni course

Cheers for the advice people.

Think I'm gonna spend a little more and go NTSC.

Thanks again.

[rhubarbe]

You mean PAL, don't you?

.....lol yea, PAL i mean