Today, TV broadcasting offers the latest playback formats, but you can still hear regularly about standards such as PAL or NTSC. What is better and what is the difference between them? To understand this, you need to get an idea of each of these standards.
What is NTSC?
So, many American recording media are in NTSC format. What it is? Today it is a color coding system used by DVD players. Until recently, it was used by broadcast television in North America, Japan and most of South America.
As color TVs began to replace black and white, developers began to use several different color coding methods for broadcasting. However, these methods contradicted each other and old black and white televisions, which could not interpret the color signals transmitted to them. In 1953, the US National Television Systems Committee adopted the NTSC standard, which was developed and implemented as a single entity. From that moment it became possible to use it throughout the country, as it became compatible with a large number of different TVs. Currently, NTSC can still be found. What does it mean? Although modern TVs no longer use this format, they can still receive and distinguish it.
What is the PAL format?
Before deciding on the choice of which is better - PAL or NTSC, you need to understand how they differ from each other.
The PAL format is a color coding system used by DVD players and broadcast television in Europe, most of Asia and Oceania, Africa and parts of South America.
Formatting Phase Alternating Line or PAL, along with the SECAM standard (previously used in Russia and the CIS, the image in this method is translated as a serial color with memory), was developed in the late 1950s to circumvent certain disadvantages of the NTSC system.
Since NTSC encodes color, this means that the signal may lose clarity in poor conditions, so early systems created in this format were vulnerable in bad weather, in large buildings, and under the influence of several other factors. To solve this problem, a PAL video format was created. It works as follows - when broadcasting, it changes every second line in the signal, effectively eliminating errors.
Unlike NTSC, PAL is still often used for broadcasting in the regions in which it was received.
PAL or NTSC: which is better to use?
Many video editing programs, for example, VideoStudio, allow you to choose in which format to save the result when recording to DVD.
Which format you should use mainly depends on your location. If you create videos that will be displayed worldwide, NTSC of your choice is more secure and comfortable. Most DVD players and other PAL compatible devices can play NTSC video, while NTSC players do not usually support PAL.
Why are these formats still in use?
The main answer is that today they are not what they were originally created. Obviously, the technical problems for the solution of which these coding systems were created in the 1950s are not applicable to the modern world. Nevertheless, DVDs are still marked as supporting NTSC or PAL (which is better to purchase and why - read above), and the timings, resolutions and refresh rates set in these systems are still used in modern TVs and monitors.
The main reason for this is the regionalization of content. The use of various video formats acts as a layer of physical protection to strengthen national copyright laws, and to prevent the distribution of films and television programs in different countries without permission. In fact, this is the use of formats as a legal method of copyright protection. This phenomenon is so common that the distribution areas for video games and other interactive electronic media are often called the NTSC and PAL regions, although such software works fine on any type of display.
PAL, NTSC formats: what is the difference from the technical side?
Televisions show their images in rows and create the illusion of movement, displaying them slightly altered, many times per second. The broadcast signal for black and white television simply indicated the brightness level at each point along the line, so each frame was just a signal with brightness information for each line.
Televisions initially displayed 30 frames per second (FPS). However, when color was added to widescreen broadcasting, black and white TVs could not distinguish color information from brightness information, so they tried to display the color signal as part of the image. As a result, it became meaningless, and there was a need to introduce a new TV standard.
In order to display the color without causing this problem, for the broadcast it was necessary to add a second color signal between the fluctuations in the brightness signal, which would be ignored by black and white televisions, and color devices would search for it and display using an adapter called Colorplexer.
Since this extra signal was added between each frame update, it increased the amount of time it took to change them, and the actual FPS on the display was reduced. Therefore, NTSC TV plays 29.97 frames per second instead of 30.
In turn, the PAL signal uses 625 lines, of which 576 (known as the 576i signal) are displayed as visible lines on the TV, while the NTSC formatted signal uses 525 lines, of which 480 appear visible (480i). In PAL video, every second line has a phase of a color signal change, which leads to the fact that they align the frequency between the lines.
What does it mean?
In terms of effect, this means that signal damage appears as a saturation error (color level), rather than a hue (color tint), as it would be in an NTSC video. This led to a more accurate picture of the original image. At the same time, the PAL signal loses some vertical color resolution, making the colors at the junction of the lines a little blurry, although this effect is not visible to the naked human eye. On modern DVDs, the signal is no longer encoded on the basis of interlocking lines, so there are no frequency and phase differences between the two formats.
The only real difference is the resolution and frame rate with which the video plays.
Convert from NTSC to PAL and vice versa
If the video in PAL is converted to NTSC tape, you need to add 5 additional frames per second. Otherwise, the image may appear intermittent. For an NTSC movie converted to PAL, the reverse is true. Five frames per second must be deleted, or the action on the screen may seem unnaturally slow.
PAL and NTSC on HDTVs
There is a wide analog system for television, therefore, despite the fact that digital signals and high definition (HD) are becoming the universal standard, their variations remain. The primary visual difference between NTSC and PAL systems for HDTV is the refresh rate. NTSC refreshes the screen 30 times per second, and PAL systems - 25 frames per second. For some types of content, especially high-resolution images (such as those generated by 3D animation), HDTVs using the PAL system may show a slight tendency to “flicker”. However, the image quality is equal to NTSC, and most people will not notice any problems.
On a DVD signal, the signal is not encoded based on the carrier wave, so there are no frequency and phase differences between the two formats. The only real difference is the resolution and frame rate (25 or 30) with which the video is played.