PAL->NTSC conversion : S/W or H/W ?

[peterfl]

This is a great site and I am learning a lot !!!! Thanks to y'all!
I am trying to convert my old PAL 8mm tapes and some old VHS PAL home videos PAL into Digital video in NTSC and burn them on a DVD.
My major concern is the Pal to NTSC conversion quality and usage of a S/W solution vs a H/W solution.
My first attempt was using the "aDVanced DV PAL/NTSC Converter" S/W from DVunlimited. This works only on DV format (no MPEG2 support) as per documentation and it costs $98 to get rid of a watermark in the middle of the screen but qualitywise it was better than the following two options.
Other options: I tried were using Ulead Video Studio 7.0 or Movie star5.0. None looked very good and even had pixelation.

Question. Is the S/W Pal to NTSC conversion inherently so lossy that the quality is visbly affected? Is a H/W solution (dedicated converter or built in converter much better than S/W converter? Should I buy a H?W converter for converting 20 8mm tapes?

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge/experience on this topic.


Peter F.



Gear:
Pentium4 1.3Ghz, 512Meg SDRAM,
Plenty of Hard disk ( more than 380G)
Nvidia GEforce4MX 440 Video card 128Meg DDR
Firewire PCI card
Canopus Advc-100 A-D D-A converter box
JVC HRDD-857MS Multisystem video
Sony 8mm PAL camcorder (old one)
Pioneer DVD+/- * DVR-106D burner
Samsung CD-R/RW SW-232B

[bugster]

PAL to NTSC conversion should not be a problem, assuming you capture into avi format and not mpeg.

The audio and video need to be handle separtley, so seperate the two using virtualdub. Now, when you encode the video to mpeg, frameserve it from virtualdub, setting the framerate to 23,976fps, and tell the encoder to apply 3:2 pulldown to the video, or ose pulldown.exe AFTER encoding to do this.

The audio can be converted to mp2 woth BeSweet, and use the 25fps to 23.976fps conversion presets to get the correct length.

Now simply multiplex the two back together and it should all work fine.