PAL (Phase Alternation Line) – Phase Alternation line is the colour for encoding conversion standard that is used widely in areas of the world such as Europe, Asia and Africa for TV, video as well as DVD playback. This was created during the 1960’s by a German man called Walter Bruch.
Unlike the older NTSC standard PAL uses a screen resolution of 720 x 576 pixels which has a refresh rate of 25 FPS. Whereas the older version runs a higher rate of frames per seconds by running at 30 FPS but has a lower resolution at 720 x 480 pixels. This all means that Pal as a much better image quality but NTSC has much smoother pictures especially when using footage that runs at high speed. If you are producing DVD in the and are using a camera purchased in the UK than more than likely the camera will have been captured using the PAL resolution as well as the same frame rate settings. The only issue is that if you want to reach America with your DVD you have to convert the video to a lower resolution and higher frame rate which is used by the old UK standard, NTSC. But as DVD players have progressed they will very often convert the video for you depending on the video format. The issue with converting PAL to NTSC is that you need to add extra frames which very often result in the video containing very slight judders during scenes that contain fast movements. SECAM (Séquentiel Couleur Avec Mémoire) – Séquentiel Couleur Avec Mémoire is the standard television display technology that is standard in France.
It was the first European colour television standard. Today it is also used in Russia. There are only a few differences between SECAM and PAL or NTSC. One of those differences is that SECAM cannot be easily edited when it’s in its native form. This is because it uses frequency modulation, SECAM is also not linear to the input image. Camcorders and many VCR’s were all sold in SECAM countries are all internally PAL, this is because they can use a converter to convert the two standards. Another fairly large difference is that SECAM is the standard in the process of a signal transmission.
Whereas two colour signals are transmitted in a chronological sequence. Widescreen aspect ratios – TV in the 1950’s became ever more popular and this led film studios to become nervous. Many people predicted the death of cinema. But in early 1950’s Cinerama was unveiled which brought along a new unheard ratio of 2.59:1. This was very similar to a system called Polyvision with a very wide aspect of 4:1, the issue with this was that you could clearly see all of the divide lines between all of the 3 images, this issue led it to die very quickly. Unlike Polyvision Cinerama managed to pull it off much better, much like Polyvision it used the technique of filming with three cameras and three projectors to maintain the wide image.
After this many other ratios were founded including CinemaScope’s 2.35:1 which wasn’t as big but managed to be filed using only one camera and one project all because of the use of the anamorphic lens. Component video signals – When DVD’s were invented it was important that they had a way of preserving the separation of all of the three coloured signals.
This is where component video signals come in hand as you want to ideally reduce the overall information. Otherwise known as signal Y Component signals one channel to carry the basic black and white information, now there is also a channel for the colour difference which is how much blue and red there is when in relevance to black and white. All of these channels are very usually colour related using the three colours of green, blue and red. Composite video signals – Composite video is a method in which the colour, B/W and Luminance portions an analogue signal are transferred as a pair from any source to a VCR or DVD otherwise known as a video recording device. Composite videos are analogue and usually consists of either 480i NTSC or 576i PAL, you would tend not to use composite signals High definition video; HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) DVI (Digital Visual Interface)
