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Post by Bob Savage (robstar) on Jan 23, 2009 14:25:55 GMT
What's the easiest way to convert the NTSC signal to Pal? Can it be done without a computer and at a relative cheap cost? I am currently converting my video & film collection to DVD and have a few NTSC tapes that I would like to put on compiles with similar programmes that are in Pal format. Any help much appreciated!
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Post by Peter Stirling on Jan 23, 2009 20:59:47 GMT
If its VHS then you will need a NTSC machine or an NTSC capable machine to play out the tape into your computer .Once it goes into your computer then your software should be able to output it to a Pal DVD in a straight forward manner.
What you want to avoid (IMHO) is a PAL machine that plays back NTSC as PAL .Simply because technology has moved on since those machines were built and you may not get the best result...but I maybe wrong?
Plenty of cheap machines on EBay that playback NTSC, the ones without tuners EX. office/corporate market machines could be the best bet for today? as many have sat in a meeting room doing nothing for most of the time, they are also rugged with stable pictures, and built like battleships.
Now someone else will tell you they have been thrashed to death in the office/corp market, but even if they are, they will still work better than a domestic machine --- and if your only doing a few tapes and a machine comes along for £20 ?? its got to be worth it hasnt it?
..
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Post by Andy Smith on Jan 24, 2009 4:43:19 GMT
From my limited experience,and a lot of mucking about with the settings,i found that when you are using a computer you have to set your capture device input and output settings to NTSC and you should get a decent reult.I only use a cheapo capture device i got from Maplins,i dare say there are more expensive capture cards that will do the job better.I only have a crappy Bush Nicam video that plays back NTSC tapes,so as the previous poster mentioned you may need a dedicated NTSC video player for the best results.
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Post by Colin Anderton on Jan 24, 2009 8:55:20 GMT
This may not be the cheapest alternative, but I have used a box of tricks called the "Ace" converter - and I've always found it produces brilliant results. When I bought mine (three or four years ago, I think) it cost about £300.
Mind you, for film that's been transferred to an NTSC video tape, you'll find that it's been "stretched out" from 24fps to fill the 30 fps of NTSC video. So you do need a computer to correct this, if you want to get rid of the horrible jerky movement.
Colin.
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Post by Robert Manners on Jan 26, 2009 0:58:43 GMT
the 25fps to 29.97fps is what gets me. Anyone know the best PC based programme to correct this as if you get it wrong then horrible jerky movement is all you see!
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Post by Colin Anderton on Jan 26, 2009 9:06:50 GMT
Hi Robert. It's a bit of a long process, but I do it this way, and the results are brilliant.
Assuming the film footage is on disk and not tape, as a DVD will give a perfect slow-motion replay, I play the NTSC footage - with the replay machine set to PAL - at 1/8th speed onto my DVD recorder. Slow, I know, but necessary. This ensures that you have seperate frames to work with.
By the way, you do, of course, need a machine that will play at slow speed with no speed indicator showing on screen.
Then I copy that footage from my recorder to my computer (I use an Apple machine for editing).
Next, I speed the footage up x8 times. VERY IMPORTANT! - Turn off Frame Blending!!!
Now you are, of course, back to the original speed, but the frames are properly "seperated".
Now you have a film with each 4th frame repeated, so the sequence goes 1,2,3,4,4,1,2,3,4,4,1,2,3,4,4, etc. So now you need to remove every 5th frame, which is causing the jerky motion.
It's now a simple matter of speeding up the footage by 125%. But VERY IMPORTANT! - Again, make sure you turn off the Frame Blending option.
As long as you prepare the sequence beginning with frame 1, you will find that each 5th frame has now been removed, and you have a beautiful film running smoothly at 25 frames per second.
Personally, I store all my film footage at 25fps - one frame of film per one frame of video - because you can always use a computer later to slow it down to 24fps in order to see it at it's proper speed.
I hope I haven't been too long-winded, but I find it works perfectly.
I bought a huge amount of disks with film from early space flights, and I've processed them all this way. A long job, but well worth it.
Hope this helps.
Colin.
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Post by Chris H on Jan 26, 2009 18:21:40 GMT
This may not be the cheapest alternative, but I have used a box of tricks called the "Ace" converter - and I've always found it produces brilliant results. When I bought mine (three or four years ago, I think) it cost about £300. Colin. I have a GTH Electronics ACE too, excellent piece of kit and they do very good quality conversions, much better than most of those world standards conversion VCRs that were popular a few years back. The bad news is that they are no longer in production. The guy who made them had to stop because of some new ruling about using lead free solder. Maybe you can find one secondhand? Chris. |
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RWels
Member
Posts: 2,908
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Post by RWels on Jan 27, 2009 22:12:56 GMT
It may not be the answer in this case, but there also is a trick that makes dvds appear as the other format (PAL/NTSC). Basically you change the descriptions in the IFO files to trick the dvd player into thinking it can play the format (some machines don't notice the trick, some do). forum.videohelp.com/topic221928.html |
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Post by markboulton on Jan 29, 2009 13:11:51 GMT
If you have any bogstandard VHS machine that states "NTSC Playback" or "Quasi-NTSC", and you simply play the tape into a Philips DVD Recorder, the Philips will automatically detect that it's NTSC and record/encode it accordingly.
On a Lite-On, you have to set the 'TV Type' to NTSC first (it doesn't auto-switch) and you'll only see a B/W image while it's transferring, but when finished switch TV Type back to PAL, et voila.
Other brands of DVD Recorder are a mixed bag. JVC, Panasonic and Sony all tend to have different manual menu settings for this sort of thing (or be lacking them and have no auto detect either) depending on the model or what revision of the model you've bought.
I used to have a really crappy Lite-On, the primary function of which seemed to be that it was designed to be used as a camping hob. However it did stunning NTSC-'PAL' conversions.
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Post by Robert Manners on Feb 3, 2009 22:59:25 GMT
Yes I have used this before Mark, however I once achieved this on a PC while noise reducing and colour correcting to the output Mpeg-2 source. Thats what I was now aiming to do once again. Thank you all the same.
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Post by Colin Anderton on Feb 4, 2009 9:27:53 GMT
But just copying from one machine to another - even if it changes the format in the process - will not get rid of the jerky movement that always results when 24fps film is originally transferred to NTSC.
My method above is laborious, but it's the only way I know of getting one frame of film to one frame of video, and therefore smooth and realistic movement.
Colin.
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