The other day my brother, who is somewhat of an Austria-phile, was pondering his collection of DVDs of the annual Vienna New Years Day concerts. As he says:
Each year it is released on a different label although the content is always sourced from ORF (the Austrian ABC).1987 – Sony.
1989 – Deutsche Grammophon.
2000 – EMI.
2001 – Teldec.
2002 & 2003 – TDK.
2004 – Deutsche Grammophon.The weird thing is that out of all of these DVDs both Deutsche Grammophon are in NTSC. The others have an NTSC version for the US and a PAL version for Europe. A quick check on Amazon.uk reveals all the DVDs released by Deutsche Grammophon are NTSC – but this is a German company??? Strange.
So why would Deutsche Grammophon do all its DVD releases in NTSC when it is a German company (Germany is not just a PAL nation, but the home of PAL). Here are a couple of possible explanations.
First, if a company wants to keep its inventory small by carrying just one format, yet sell in both Europe and the US, then it’s wise to encode NTSC rather than PAL. The reason is that the majority of TVs sold in Europe (and Australia) over the last ten years will display both PAL and NTSC, while most TVs sold in the US will display NTSC, but not PAL.
Ordinarily I’d say that DG still ought to provide us PAL-people the best possible quality (ie. PAL), except for one thing. If DG used film rather than video to record, then the transfer to PAL involves a 4% speed increase and, consequently, a 4% pitch raise (the 24 frames per second of the film are simply transferred, one-to-one, to the 25 frames per second of PAL video). Since DG is primarily a classical music record label, pitch accuracy may well be higher on its list of priorities than video resolution, so perhaps they chose to go NTSC for the sake of the audio. It is possible to do film to PAL conversions while preserving the audio’s pitch, but this can result in video that has the dual disadvantage of suffering from NTSC-like interlacing, without the redeeming feature of being effectively corrected by the enormous amount of equipment designed to minimise NTSC interlacing.
This argument doesn’t apply, of course, if the thing was captured in either PAL or NTSC video in the first place.