SONY DVW-500 and 500p - issues with 2 PAL tapes

[MikeMGMVE]

Apologies if this is in the wrong forum - It's more of a potential hardware thing, and it didn't match up to any of the sub-forums from what I saw.

I acquired 2 Digibeta tapes to digitize for a friend. I work in post as an editor - and asked my post supervisor if he could help as we have the decks. We have a Sony DVW-500 and 500p - as our two main decks, but have also several other older backup decks as well.

The tapes are PAL, but the PAL player rejects the tapes immediately. The NTSC deck accepts the tape and will play it, but at 29fps, so the speed and picture are wonky. We're both utterly confused by it.

I tried inserting into the PAL player again, and pressing play immediately and the deck does start to play it, but outputs no video signal. The player accepts other PAL tapes and rejects other NTSC tapes.

I'm not too knowledgeable about the hardware aspects at all, but figured it was worth putting it out there in case we're missing something obvious.

[hech54]

Maybe an odd "flavor" of PAL....from South America somewhere.....or French SECAM?....or eastern Europe? They had a few odd variants I believe.
I've dealt with a SECAM tape once....never did get it to capture. Eventually found the same tape in straight PAL version.

[johns0]

Ask your friend what camera the tapes were shot on and in what format.

[johnmeyer]

From the manual:

https://docs.sony.com/release/bkdw515_380054104_om.pdf

The DVW-A500/1, A500P/1, 500/1, and 500P/1 Digital Videocassette Recorders adopt the Digital Betacam format, and are differentiated as follows:

• The DVW-A500/1 and DVW-A500P/1 are capable of playing back analog Betacam and Betacam SP format cassette tapes.
• The DVW-500/1 and DVW-500P/1 are not compatible with either the analog Betacam or Betacam SP formats.
• The DVW-A500/1 and 500/1 can be used in the NTSCcolor system while the DVW-A500P/1 and 500P/1 can be used in the PAL color system, though they both adopt a component format

Since it doesn't appear to me that either of your decks is capable of multi-standard playback (i.e., can play both PAL and NTSC), I think perhaps the tapes may not be in the format indicated on the tape shell. I don't see any other explanation for what you report: the NTSC player plays a supposed "PAL" tape. I don't think that is possible.

[johns0]

A ntsc will play a pal tape but at the wrong speed and out of sync.

[johnmeyer]

A ntsc will play a pal tape but at the wrong speed and out of sync.

I guess the OP did say that the playback of the PAL tape in the NTSC machine was "wonky." The few times I tried to do that with PAL VHS tapes in an NTSC VCR (VHS is a different animal, of course), the picture was more than just a little unstable.

The SECAM idea seems like the most plausible explanation so far.

[dellsam34]

You need to figure out what tapes you have, You said you have digibeta tapes but in the other hand you said you played a NTSC tape in a PAL machine which indicate that the tapes are analog Betacam. At least post pictures so we can see the colors of the shells and identification holes.

I'm not sure if Betacam ever existed in SECAM.