I received a much anticipated DVD set in the mail last week, The Directors Series, showcasing the work of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham. Gondry’s work was what I was most interested in, having been a fan of his videos since long before I knew who he was.
MUCH TO MY DISTRESS as I starting watched them, I found that they looked "bad" somehow, with strange video artefacts and jarring motion, especially in Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar and Bjork’s Joga. Then I realized that my new [cheap] DVD player must be forcibly converting the 60Hz NTSC signal [the TV standard in the USA] to a 50Hz PAL signal [the TV standard here in Australia]. Yikes!
Luckily it turned out that the player was simply defaulting to "safe" mode, and could easily be configured to output whatever signal the DVD was encoded as. Since most TVs are multi-system these days, this worked fine, and the clips now look great in NTSC mode.