[MacDV] NTSC switches to PAL

[Aaron]

>From: Mark Des Cotes <mark at astroprinting.com>
>Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 08:27:48 -0500
>
>Hi all,
>
>My son has a presentation to make at school and needed a couple of
>minutes of video from one of the TV shows he watches. I figured out
>how to download the episode he needed. (I know it's not right but I'm
>not about to purchase an entire season on DVD just to have two
>minutes of video. And I've already checked Blockbuster and they don't
>have it.) I thought the easiest thing was to just prepare a DVD-Video
>disk in Roxio Toast, Add the video and crop it down to just the
>couple of minutes he needs. That part was simple enough, but when
>click to burn the disk a message pops up that it's changing the
>format from NTSC to PAL and I don't have a choice in the matter.

Perhaps you have "Toast Preferences -> General -> TV Standard" set to PAL.

> I have no idea if the DVD players at his school will play a PAL disk.

Almost every recent DVD player will play PAL disks, but it doesn't hurt to ask. If they don't know, get the model number and check its specs online.

But, rather than converting an NTSC video to PAL and have the player convert it back to NTSC, check out a program called MovieGate to convert the required piece of the AVI file (cut with QuickTime Pro, perhaps) to a DVD.

 - Aaron

>Why would it do this? The downloaded file has a long extension of
>".dvdrip.xvid-sfm.avi". I'm not all that familiar with iMovie or
>iDVD, can I use either of them to somehow convert the file so I can
>burn a NTSC disk?
>
>Mark