Foreign Video Formats (PAL, SECAM)
As Denver increasing becomes an international city, the distinct possibility that you may get some video in PAL or SECAM formats becomes more real. In fact, we have converted PAL tapes for several clients in the past year… we’ve even gone the OTHER way, and converted American formats to PAL for overseas distribution!
What Is Video Standards Conversion?
The majority of the world uses TV standards that are different and incompatible with the US TV standard (NTSC). Even the newer HD formats are not all the same. Therefore, foreign video recordings cannot be played on US equipment, or even displayed on US standard TV sets. As part of our video duplication services at RMAVP, we also convert foreign videos (also referred to as Digital Standards Conversion). With our digital standards conversion services, we can make a complex task super easy for you – just send us your master tape and we’ll do the rest!
What is the process?
We’ll take your master video tape and play it on a compatible deck. This signal is then sent to a “Standards Converter” where the video signal is reassembled to the video format that we want to create for you. Sounds simple, but is a rather complex process. We can convert your video to, or from NTSC, PAL, or SECAM.
Why are there different video standards?
Here’s a little history why – In 1953 the US was the first country to widely implement the first color TV broadcast system based on the NTSC standard (National Television System Committee). Until recently, the NTSC standard was used in the US and in most countries of the Western Hemisphere as well as Japan and some other countries of Asia. Frame rate (number of times the screen is redrawn in a second) is 29.97 frames per second with 525 lines/frame. Newer HD formats also differ.
Later in the 1950s and early 1960s the PAL standard (Phase Alternating Line) was adopted by most European countries, except for France, which used the SECAM standard (the French acronym for Sequential Color with Memory). With wider channel bandwidth, these standards allowed for better picture quality than did NTSC. Both PAL and SECAM have frame rates of 25 frames per second with 625 lines/frame. In addition to different frame rates and line numbers, standard video speed is slower in PAL and SECAM than in NTSC. The process called standards conversion makes possible to display video in one standard which was broadcast or recorded in a different standard.
For a List of Countries and associated TV Broadcast Standards please visit our full web page, or feel free to email or call. We are always glad to help!