By Andrew Shapiro

One of the things both our industrial clients and our entertainment clients have in common is an increase in the amount of content they need to send abroad. Establishing a foothold for your business in an international market or making sure your latest nature special gains as much revenue as possible form the European market are both excellent reasons to consider producing replication runs for overseas consumers. The only down side, in fact, is the confusing array of standards and compatibility issues that can arise when leaving the USA. Lets take a look at the major considerations in some depth:

I find it odd that the majority of my clients have some familiarity with the one issue that causes the least amount of problems. When producers and publishers are interested in sending a disc over seas, it seems almost everyone knows to ask for a, “Region 0” DVD. Region 0 is a term coined for a disc that does not have any restrictions on where it can be played back. This level of restriction is determined by compatibility between the region flags authored onto the disc and a setting in the DVD player, (usually accessible only by the manufacturer) that tells the software what region the player is supposed to play.

Region Code Image Courtesy of Wikipedia

This is the easiest part of the process to get right because essentially there are eight check boxes in most professional DVD authoring software, and they each correspond to the regions the DVD Association used to divide up the consumer world. USA and Canada form region 1, Europe comprises Region 2, Japan and Southeast Asia make up region 3 and so forth. As long as the box is ticked for the corresponding region, the disc will play in units manufactured for that part of the world, well, at least as far as region encoding goes.

And I should mention for a moment why these regions exist. This system was designed primarily to prevent legitimately manufactured DVD copies of feature films from being imported to another country before the theatrical release had even hit the cine-plexes. There can be delays of six months or more between the time a movie comes out for American theatres and the time it is released in England. The distributors and publishers would hate to undercut the foreign box office figures for a film because everyone with access to Amazon can just buy the movie on disc instead of waiting for it in the theatre.

So, that’s that for region encoding then.  What could really throw a wrench in the works is the actual television standard. Europe and many other parts of the world have an entirely different electrical system that runs on a 50 Hz frequency. Our American electrical grid runs on a 60Hz frequency. Back before fancy electronic circuits with special crystals in them for keeping time were the norm, most electronic devices actually got their “clock” from the frequency of the electricity coming out of the mains. This could result in all sorts of interesting things like your favorite record album playing slower at your house than at your friend’s house across town; Your plug-in alarm clock always losing time relative to your fancy swiss watch, and other quirks of the pre-electronic age lifestyle.

What it absolutely must mean is that the refresh rate for televisions in the U.S. And Europe would be fundamentally different. (The refresh rate is how many times the screen is updated with a new image over a given period of time.) Each one sixtieth of a second, American TVs draw a field, which is either the even numbered lines of a TV picture or the odd numbered lines. Because it takes two fields, or both the even and odd numbered lines of a picture, to make a frame, we get a frame-rate of 30 frames every second. This is related directly to our electrical system running at 60 cycles per second. Europe, on the other hand, has an electrical cycling rate of 50 times per second, and the same thing applies. Every 50th of a second one half of the image can be drawn resulting in a frame rate of 25 frames per second.

Lest you think that’s the end of it, it gets even more confusing. American Television works on a frame size of 720 x 486 while European Television works on a standard size of 720 x 576. So to summarize in a completely inadequate manner, European TV signals run at a slower rate using a higher resolution, and American signals refresh faster with a slightly smaller image size.

These two standards are referred to as NTSC for North American Signals, and PAL for European signals. (Just to make everything harder, France actually runs on a system called SEACAM. Some parts of Eastern Europe and Africa also use this system.) As you can imagine, because converting the actual frame rate and resolution of ALL video assets may be necessary to make a product accessible in other countries, this is a far more involved matter than simple region encoding.

Luckily a combination of Europe’s insatiable desire for American entertainment products combined with their less, shall we say, enthusiastic adherence to draconian copyright laws, have made this conversion process less of a headache. The much more multi-lingual nature of region two combined with the differing cultures of film making means the average DVD buyer in Europe wants to buy DVDs from a far larger selection of sources than just his or her home country. DVD player Manufacturers are aware of this, and they have given Europeans and many other regions of the world a much higher variety of region free and multi-standard units in which to play their DVDs. In addition, television manufacturers have cottoned onto the same principle and, as such, many of the popular television brands and models convert on the fly between televisions standards. This combination of both playback units and televisions that may convert means that NTSC standard DVD discs have upwards of a 75% playback rate most of Europe.

Throw in the fact that software DVD players such as you would use on your computer, or laptop don’t care at all, and neither do many video game consoles if they’re hooked up to a hi-definition monitor, and you have a surprisingly high rate of American disc playback in other countries. Many of our business clients opt to only produce an NTSC version of their project because they know the vast majority of their European viewers will be using a laptop or desktop computer. Likewise many of our entertainment clients do not go through the extra expense of making a PAL copy because of the self selecting nature of the clientele in Europe or elsewhere. That is to say, those who see out American products probably already have units and / or televisions capable of playing back NTSC discs.

There are plenty of reasons one might choose to go through the extra time and expense of creating a properly converted PAL disc for European audiences: For extremely large retail releases, wherein even an incompatibility rate of 8% could mean 1500 refunded discs. In a video project with extremely high production values where video quality is paramount, a professionally done, high-quality conversion would be far more desirable than allowing the visual quality to be at the whim of which bargain player the consumer has purchased.

In the next column we will talk about two more issues with sending discs overseas. These are more design decisions than technical hurdles so we’ll leave them alone for this week. Hopefully after reading this, it is clearer that foreign DVD production can be confusing, but it needn’t be intimidating.