Rivergate Software Inc. - makers of DVDAfterEdit

60i playback of 24p material is supported, just as it is with SD DVD players, is that what you mean ? You're right that going 25p to 24p is standard for movie footage and relatively benign, but starting with 50i material this would mean de-interlacing, losing a lot of the perceived extra motion resolution of a 1080i capture in the process.

Incidentally all the PAL framerates are part of the spec, this is purely a practical limitation of the players at this point in time, and it applies to both SD and HD resolutions, to the best of my knowledge. The alleged firmware updates could be coming tomorrow - or not...

Ian

I agree for film-based material it's not too much of an issue. However there is lots of European material shot at 25 fps, usually interlaced. Currently all of this needs to be frame-rate converted which involves a fairly hefty quality hit, and certainly is much more time-consuming and expensive. As a prime example, think of "Planet Earth" - by the time the HD DVDs came to be made, the only version available was the 1080i broadcast masters. All of which had to be converted - it's a real shame it couldn't simply have been encoded in the native format...

Ian

If this is what's being put on the majority of HD-DVD/BD discs, isn't the question about PAL -vs- NTSC *frame rates* a red herring? As long as the player can convert this to something your display can handle, all should be good. The same holds true for any SD materials: as long as the player can output a signal you can watch, what does it matter (to the viewer, that is)?

Michael

Hi Steve,

Welcome to the club ! Which player(s) did you go for ? To answer your question, Yes, PAL and NTSC still exist. However European HD DVD Players don't support PAL framerates, at the moment. This will supposedly be fixed by a future firmware upgrade, but in the meantime all HD DVDs need to be authored as NTSC, unfortunately. Since encoding costs are one of the major costs of HD authoring at this point, many people are using the same encodes for their Blu Ray releases, which effectively limits those, too - although afaik PAL encodes on BD are fine in players.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,

Ian