Today TV broadcasts offer the latest playback formats, but you still hear about standards like PAL or NTSC on a regular basis. Which is better and what is the difference between them? To understand this, it is necessary to gain an understanding of each of these standards.
What is NTSC?
So, many American video recording media are in NTSC format. What it is? Today it is the 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 televisions began to replace black and white, developers began to use several different color encoding methods for broadcast. However, these methods conflicted with each other and the 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 standard. From that moment on, it became possible to use it all over the country, as it became compatible with a large number of different TVs. Nowadays, NTSC can still be found. What does it mean? Despitemodern TVs no longer use this format, they can still receive and distinguish it.
What is PAL format?
Before deciding which is better - PAL or NTSC, you need to understand how they differ from each other.
PAL is the color coding system used by DVD players and broadcast television in Europe, most of Asia and Oceania, Africa, and parts of South America.
Phase Alternating Line or PAL formatting, along with the SECAM standard (previously used in Russia and the CIS, the image in this method is broadcast as sequential color with memory), was developed in the late 1950s to work around certain shortcomings of the system NTSC.
Because NTSC encodes color, this means that the signal can lose clarity in poor conditions, so early systems based on this format were vulnerable to bad weather, large buildings, and several other factors. To solve this problem, the PAL video format was created. It works in the following way - during translation, it changes every second line in the signal, effectively eliminating errors.
Unlike NTSC, PAL is still often used for over-the-air broadcasting in the regions where it was adopted.
PAL or NTSC: which is better to use?
Many video editing programs, such as VideoStudio, allow you to choose the format in which your work is saved when burning to DVD.
Which format should youto use, mainly depends on your location. If you are creating videos that will be displayed around the world, NTSC of your choice is safer and more comfortable. Most DVD players and other PAL format devices can play NTSC video, while NTSC players usually do not 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 that these coding systems were created to solve in the 1950s do not apply to the modern world. However, DVDs are still labeled as NTSC or PAL (which is better to buy 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 different video formats acts as a layer of physical protection to enforce national copyright laws, and prevent films and TV programs from being distributed 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 distribution areas for video games and other interactive electronic media are often referred to as NTSC and PAL regions, although such software works fine on any type ofdisplay.
PAL, NTSC formats: what is the technical difference?
TVs show their images line by line and create the illusion of movement by displaying them slightly altered, many times per second. The broadcast signal for black and white television simply indicated the level of brightness at each point along the line, so each frame was simply a signal with information about the brightness for each line.
Initially TVs displayed 30 frames per second (FPS). However, when color was added to widescreen broadcasts, black and white TVs could not distinguish color information from luminance information, so they tried to display the color signal as part of the picture. As a result, it became meaningless, and there was a need to introduce a new TV standard.
To display color without this problem, the broadcast needed to add a second color signal between the luminance waveforms, which would be ignored by black and white TVs, and color devices would look for it and display it using an adapter called the Colorplexer.
Because 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 a TV, while in a formatted NTSC signal525 lines are used, of which 480 appear to be visible (480i). In PAL video, every second line has a color change phase, which causes them to equalize the frequency between lines.
What does that mean?
In terms of effect, this means that signal corruption appears as a saturation (color level) error rather than a hue (color tint) as it would in NTSC video. This resulted in a more accurate picture of the original image. However, the PAL signal loses some vertical color resolution, making the colors at the junction of lines a bit washed out, although this effect is not visible to the naked human eye. On modern DVDs, the signal is no longer encoded on the basis of joining lines, so there are no frequency and phase differences between these two formats.
The only real difference is the resolution and frame rate at which the video is played.
Conversion from NTSC to PAL and vice versa
If PAL video is converted to NTSC tape, 5 additional frames per second must be added. Otherwise, the image may appear choppy. For an NTSC movie converted to PAL, the reverse rules apply. Five frames per second must be removed or the action on the screen may appear unnaturally slow.
PAL and NTSC on HDTVs
There is a wide analogue system for television, so while digital signals and high definition (HD) become the universal standard, variations remain. Primarythe visual difference between NTSC and PAL for HDTV is the refresh rate. NTSC refreshes the screen 30 times per second, while PAL systems refresh 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 exhibit a slight "flickering" tendency. However, the picture quality is NTSC and most people will not notice any problems.
The DVD signal is not encoded based on the carrier wave, so there are no frequency or phase differences between the two formats. The only real difference is the resolution and frame rate (25 or 30) at which the video is played.
