8mm Pal to NTSC

[GR8LAKER]

I have some old 8mm Pal tapes from the early 90's that I recored on a borrowed camcorder when I was in Europe & Africa. I recently unearthed the tapes but have no means of watching them. Is there a simple, low cost method to convert the tapes to NTSC and put them on either my hard drive or a DVD?

Thanks.

[yoda313]

Do you have a pal camcorder to play them back on? If not then you'll have to find a company that can do the transfer for you.

If you wanted to go online and buy a used pal camcorder than you could do the conversion yourself. Either choice will cost a bit.

But if there are only a handful of tapes I would suggest looking for a company to do the transfer. Since you would have no need for the camcorder that shoots a different format after you're done you'd be buying equipment for a single purpose and you could avoid that.

[lordsmurf]

Just get PAL DVDs made. You'll lower quality converting to NTSC.
Almost all NTSC players (anything not made in Japan) tends to play PAL now.

Have a company do it -- it will be cheaper than importing a good VCR,
and better quality than using some cheap/crappy "converting VCR" off eBay/etc.

[GR8LAKER]

Thanks for your advice guys. I had it in mind to just send the tapes off somewhere and have them converted and that's what I'm going to do. I do only have 5 tapes to be done, so I'm not going to invest in any equipment to do it myself.