CATEGORY: Video Postproduction

Standards Conversion & the Alchemist Ph.C

You may be familiar with the terms NTSC (National Television System Committee), PAL (Phase Alternating Line) and SECAM (“Séquentiel couleur à mémoire,” which is French for “Sequential Color with Memory.”) 

They are the three main broadcast standards in the world, and the broadcast telelvision signals of a particular country are one of the three (some countries do have two). 

For a complete list of the standards in the world, check out http://www.sivideo.com/9stand.htm

We here in the USA are NTSC, while most of Europe is PAL.  France and a number of countries in Asia are SECAM.  

PAL and SECAM are quite similar, and since the requests for our making SECAM dubs is very rare here at Video Labs, I’ll confine my comments in this article to NTSC vs. PAL.

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Effective Writing: Think Like the Fox

The fox turned and stared straight at the camera for several long seconds. Then, apparently judging that we were not a threat, she continued with her main business of hunting food. We kept rolling.

I’ve been filming – or attempting to film – red foxes in my neighborhood for one of my new independently-produced segments for Maryland Public Television’s weekly series, Outdoors Maryland. It occurred to me during my stalking endeavors that pursuing foxes is not unlike pursuing viewers of a media production, whether documentary or corporate, video or website.

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The Challenges with Captions & Subtitles for DVDs

Nothing seems to be easy in our media world these days. You’d think that if there were captions on a master videotape that it would be easy to transfer them when encoding the tape to a DVD.  But of course, it’s not that simple.

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Problem playing back your Canon HDV tapes?

The Canon XL H1 is a mighty fine camera.  http://www.usa.canon.com/app/html/XLH1/index.shtml

And many of my clients seem to be gravitating toward it.

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