If you live in an NTSC country, you will not gain any benefit from a PAL transfer - unless you have a truly PAL-capable player and TV (i.e. not just a player that does on-the-fly conversion). If however you live in Europe or Australia, then my project may be of interest to you.
- Higher Resolution
PAL images use 576 visible lines of resolution compared to only 480 for the NTSC system, that's a 20% increase in picture definition. Some of the extra lines are of course in the black letterbox bars, but the PAL laserdisc contains approx. 50 more lines of picture information than the NTSC version. Not as marked as comparing a letterboxed transfer to an anamorphic version (increase of 33%), but still siginificant.
The difference can be seen in close-ups of areas containing fine horizontal detail. For example, compare the detail in the following two shots, one from my capture of the French PAL release, the other from the US NTSC definitive collection (pic stolen from Zion's website).
(This is just a preliminary example, my pic is from a raw cap and clearly needs brightening up, and maybe some colour enhancemnt - I will edit this post to provide a better example in the future)
Look at the control panel in the background, in particular the diagonal line of lights to the top right. In the PAL version, you can clearly see each individual light. In the NTSC shot, these all combine into one. Of course this could be because of the filters that were applied afterwards, so I'd be interested to get a raw unfiltered shot to compare against. (Also interesting to note the framing of the image; the PAL version has more of the image at the sides but is missing some off the top.) - No 3:2 pulldown
A movie shot to film has a framerate of 24 frames per second. Some adjustments are required to make this compatible with the NTSC television refresh rate of 59.94Hz. Each two frames are shown over 5 consecutive screen refreshes (3 use the first frame and 2 use the second - this is known as 3:2 pulldown). Frame 1 appears on screen for 0.050s and frame 2 for 0.033s and so on, this inconsistency results in a "motion judder" for fast moving objects or camera pans.
Most people who live in an NTSC country are used to this judder and do not notice it, however for those of us in PAL countries who are used to seeing smooth motion the effect can be unbearable.
One of the worst scenes is the "rebel fleet amassing" in ROTJ.
- Flicker
The lower refresh rate of a standard PAL CRT TV may be noticeable as flicker, especially on larger screen sizes and white backgrounds. Most people who live in PAL countries are used to this flicker and don't notice it, but for NTSC people used to higher refresh rates the effect may be unbearable. - Speedup
Although PAL does not suffer from motion judder, because every frame appears for 0.04s, this means that the movie plays back 4% faster at 25fps instead of 24fps. Again, if you are used to the regular speed you may notice an increase in audio pitch caused by this speedup. NOTE: It has since been noted that this pitch increase is not present in the PAL soundtrack used. The audio on the UK VHS release has been sped up using time compression, a method which preserves the original pitch. - Higher bitrate required
Since PAL has a higher resolution, it therefore follows that you need to use a higher datarate to get the same encode quality as the NTSC counterpart. Use of multiple passes and a variable bitrate will help to make optimal use of the bytes available, but since space on a single layer DVDR is limited there will be no extras or animated menus on these discs.