French analog TV standard from 1960s—625 lines, PAL-incompatible. Dominant in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia; technically obsolete now, archive-relevant only.
SECAM
Anyone working in France or the Soviet Union in the 1960s couldn't avoid SECAM — a color television standard that stubbornly held its ground against PAL and NTSC and still appears today in archives and when digitizing old stock. SECAM (Séquentiel Couleur à Mémoire) uses 625 lines like PAL but operates with a fundamentally different color encoding: instead of transmitting both color information simultaneously, SECAM sends the color components sequentially — first Red-Minus-Luma, then Blue-Minus-Luma. The device stores the color from the previous line (hence "à Mémoire") and combines it with the current luminance.
In practice, this means for digitization: SECAM material cannot simply be decoded like PAL. The sequential color transmission requires special decoders or — in a modern workflow — precise calibration of the capture software. Anyone working with old French or Soviet archival material will inevitably encounter this standard. The tricky part: SECAM and PAL look similar enough that beginners confuse them, but incompatible enough that incorrect playback leads to color shifts or flickering. In editing, this no longer matters today — everything is converted to digital — but during restoration, one must know what one is dealing with.
Historically, SECAM was a political statement: France wanted to be independent of German PAL licenses, and the Soviet Union needed its own standard. The result was a technical solution that worked but was less robust than PAL in the face of transmission errors. Color noise and degradation occurred faster — one reason why SECAM recordings often age worse than PAL material. Today, SECAM is archivally relevant: anyone digitizing French or Soviet TV productions from the 1970s and 80s needs equipment that can recognize and correctly convert SECAM.
In the modern workflow: SECAM is dead, but not forgotten. DVDs and streaming do not exist in SECAM — everything runs digitally. But during transfer from tape — whether videotape, Betacam, or U-Matic — the technician needs a capture card that can decode SECAM, or software that can subsequently interpret PAL material correctly as SECAM. An error here means distorted colors throughout the entire project.