The short answer is that they aren’t, at least not in the same way that they were originally intended to be.

If you’re producing videos that will be viewed globally, NTSC is a safer choice by default – most PAL VCRs and DVD players can play NTSC video, whereas NTSC players generally can’t play PAL video. Which format you should use mostly depends on your location and that of your viewers, as you can see in the map below.

The short answer for most people will be NTSC. Many video editing programs such as VideoStudio let you choose whether to output your work as NTSC- or PAL-formatted videos when burning to a DVD.

Unlike NTSC, PAL encoding is still often used for over the air broadcasting in the regions in which it was adopted. To solve this problem, the PAL video format reverses every second line in the signal, effectively cancelling out errors. The way NTSC encodes color meant the signal lost clarity under poor conditions, so early NTSC systems were vulnerable to bad weather, large buildings, especially rough terrain, and other factors. PAL formatting, along with a third common standard called SECAM (A French acronym that translates as Sequential Color with Memory) was developed in the late 1950s to deal with certain shortcomings of the NTSC system as it became more widely used. PAL format is the color encoding system used by DVD players and broadcast television in Europe, most of Asia and Oceania, most of Africa, and parts of South America. Though modern television sets don’t strictly use the NTSC format any longer, the timing and type of signal used carry over, so the format they use is usually called NTSC. In 1953, the National Television System Committee, after which the NTSC standard is named, developed and enforced a single method that could be used across the nation and be compatible with as many different TV sets as possible. However, these methods conflicted both with each other and with older black and white television sets, which weren’t able to interpret the color signals being sent to them. NTSC format is the color encoding system used by DVD players and until recently by broadcast television in North America, Japan, and most of South America.Īs color televison began to replace black and white, companies in the United States were using a number of different methods for encoding color to be broadcast to people’s homes.

Pal to ntsc dvd editor