Anybody Capturing PAL60???

[vanceen]

Is anybody successfully capturing PAL60 format video?

I live in Europe but I have a large collection of NTSC tapes that I want to edit. My Hollywood Dazzle DV Bridge and my Sony TRV325e (DV-in enabled) both capture PAL just fine and pass it on through Firewire to my PC.

The problem is with NTSC tapes. The VCR's I've tried can playback NTSC tapes to a PAL television with no problem. But when I try to capture with the Hollywood bridge I get black and white video. When I try to capture with the camcorder I get no video.

I've recently read that "NTSC playback" on most European VCRs is actually PAL60, not pure PAL. PAL60 has the same framerate and scan frequency as NTSC, but a different color frequency (whatever that is).

So it sounds like the Hollywood Bridge thinks it's seeing real NTSC, so it's only missing the color. By this theory, the camcorder is looking for PAL and PAL only, and can't handle PAL60.

So back to my original question. Has anyone else had this problem and solved it? Sounds like I need either a NTSC VCR dedicated to NTSC tapes, or else a VCR that will play back pure PAL (if such a thing exists). I hope there's another workaround; I hate to spend yet more money on this!!!

Thanks in advance!

[ironwood321]

Hi,
I have three solutions I use.
Use an analogue Fusion 878A based capture card with the following drivers http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ these work but I am experiencing dropped frames

I bought a device from Maplin which I had to build called " A RGB processor" This basically output RGB from the fed in TV signal and can recombine it with an encoder. I used a mutilstandard decoder chip instead of the PAL only one and set the encoder with appropriate crystal and links back to NTSC. As a result the TV chips receive and decode the signal and reencode the RGB information back to an NTSC signal

You could buy an American video or a multistandard one which you get normal NTSC playback on.

You could buy a standards converter box which does PAL 60 and use this to convert your signal.

The signal on you vcr in a standard NTSC one 525 x 29.797fps and 3.38Mhz colour. The PAL standard is quassi or pseudo PAL. The phase of the signal changes like in the PAL standard and the colour signal is changed to 4.43Mhz so a TV can decode the signal but the standard still uses 525lines and 29.97fps

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ironwood321 on 2002-01-13 08:09:42 ]</font>

[vanceen]

Thanks! It took a long time to figure this out...

Looks like the simplest and cheapest thing is to get hold of an NTSC VCR. Since my wife's visiting the States at the moment, that shouldn't be too hard!