Going to pull the trigger - PAL VCR output to ATI AIW 9600XT

[dj4monie]

Well after being away from the forums to pursue other things, I want to get back to my project of converting my PAL UK tapes to NTSC for playback in various formats.

Any suggested PAL VCR's that have been sucessfully used for conversion?

Any brand prefered over another?

Thanks again and I'm looking to buy something this week and start my project, thanks.

[dphirschler]

I bought the Sony brand. It has done well for me. I remember liking it because I was convinced it was built a little sturdier and seemed to focus on image quality. Not that I have other PAL VCRs to compare it against, but I am extremely happy with it. It also plugs directly into my US power outlets without the need for a power converter.


Darryl

[FulciLives]

When it comes to multi-system VHS VCR units you basically have two kinds.

1.) Can play back NTSC or PAL VHS tapes (and often SECAM) but can only output the same. Play a PAL VHS and you get PAL output.

2.) Can play back NTSC or PAL VHS tapes (and often SECAM) and can either output the same or do conversion. For instance if you play a PAL VHS it can output PAL or it can do a conversion to NTSC and output NTSC.

There are many to pick from when it comes to group 1 but there are far fewer choices when it comes to group 2.

As far as group 2 goes the only real game in town these days is the Samsung SV-5000W which has gotten some good reviews from various forum members although a friend of mine had one years ago and was not impressed with it. Maybe the current models are better?

If you go with group 1 then there are of course many choices. Back in the day Toshiba made some really nice units and they still do but I don't know if the new units are as good as the old units.

Here are a few websites to check out:

http://www.world-import.com/
http://www.220-electronics.com/
http://www.dvdoverseas.com/

If you go with a VHS VCR from group 1 you have a few choices to get it to NTSC.

1.) Play back in PAL and record to a DVD recorder in PAL or capture to your computer in PAL and leave it that way. Use a DVD player for playback that does PAL to NTSC on-the-fly.

2.) Play back in PAL and record to a DVD recorder in PAL or capture to your computer in PAL but convert to NTSC on the computer and create a new NTSC DVD using computer software and a computer burner.

3.) Use an external "digital video conversion" box that can take the PAL output from the VHS VCR and convert it to NTSC ... then record NTSC to a DVD recorder or capture to a computer as NTSC.

Method 1 is best if you want it easy. Method 2 is best quality wise but takes a lot of work and know how. Method 3 is the worst as I have yet to find an external box that does decent PAL to NTSC conversion and I've tried some of the "best" such as TenLabs and the CMD-850.

The other method or Method 4 if you will would be to use the Samsung SV-5000W since it's own built-in PAL to NTSC converter supposedly works well.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[dphirschler]

Mine is a straight up PAL VCR, not a conversion VCR. I do my own conversions on the PC after capture.


Darryl

[FulciLives]

Mine is a straight up PAL VCR, not a conversion VCR. I do my own conversions on the PC after capture.

Darryl

This is how I have done PAL VHS in the past.

The quality can be very good but when you get a poorly interlaced PAL VHS (especially one that already went through a piss poor NTSC to PAL conversion) it can be a nightmare.

Plus you have to admit it takes a lot of know how and experience.

Yet this method does provide the best quality.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[dphirschler]

I've seen some piss poor interlacing. I was suprised I was seeing that on a PAL tape since it was film based source. But DGdecomb filter saved me. I also had to set my card to capture PAL_M I think it was. I went through every letter of the alphabet trying different ones until it worked out with that one. In the other PAL formats, not only was it interlaced, but the filds were coming in out of order at random times. Man, it was wierd! I posted about it here somewhere.

[Edit- It was PAL_H. I searched for my thread and found it here: https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=265063&highlight=pal]

I would not even attempt to capture a PAL video that was converted from NTSC! Well, I might if I had to, but I do not think it would be possible to make it progressive again.


Darryl

[dj4monie]

I want to go with number 2

My ATI AIW card will display PAL on screen, I can capture it that way with either ATI's software or the included Pinncale Studio that came with the card and I have since updated twice. I have done a few captures with it actually and it works out pretty well.

From there I can convert it to the formats I want -

NTSC MPEG-2 (DVD) for Set-Top playback on larger screens in the house

NTSC WMV for TV quality viewing online on a web site I'm working on

The videos are directly from the UK and are not converted from PAL to NTSC. I paid for that to get done once and I have skipped frames in one episode and one DVD-R has 5 episodes and part of one and one whole DVD-R was wasted to include the last episode. Since it was done with a STB DVD-R, I want to able to control the resolution to squeeze it all on a single DVD without affecting playback quality. Shouldn't be a problem with dual layer DVD's.

FulciLives -

Thanks for the links, I had mainly been looking on Ebay and there a couple of 220 stores in the Los Angeles area. If I can avoid paying local tax and get it shipped quickly, I don't mind buying out of state, just not from Canada anymore. Everytime I have gotten something from there, it spends about a week at the border it seems before its cleared to come down. I've gotten stuff from Europe faster...

The videos in question are of the long forgotten Japanese anime of Thunderbird 2086. Orignally I wanted to find a service that would do it for me since I have both US releases of the series, but the rest are PAL. After I paid a local camera store to do it for me, the conversion was pretty good, it was done on a STB recorder, not too hard to mess that up. I didn't get any sort of menu, just timing markers.

I'm spoiled by domestic releases and even some good DVD's that were made by various people and sold on Ebay (Spiderman and his amazing friends for example, is very professionally done)

Anyway thanks for the pointers and I'm just trying to figure out if I want to pull the trigger also on an LCD TV or burn up more money into the SRT-4 I just got - You know NEED FOR SPEED..

I'm back for the long haul and I look forward to sharing anything I find doing the conversions and making first rate DVD's to preserve my video collection and enjoy for years to come on DVD.

One more thing, on one of the links provided, there's a Multisystem Combo VCR/DVD player that are both region free, but only output to PAL without a converter (easy fix with the ATI card). Its then I remembered that Battle of the Planets, the whole 85 episode DVD box set was only released in the UK and not in North America.

This would kill two birds with one stone, the only caveat being that I have to run anything from it through the PC for playback. That's fine since I'll be mostly using the PC for viewing once I get my LCD TV, which like I said I might pull the trigger on this pay period.

Its great to be back on the Video Help boards!

[dphirschler]

Since you are doing animation and as a fan of animation myself, I would like to stress the importance of doing it on a computer. You absolutely NEED progressive frames to do a proper conversion of animation. Anything less looks just wrong. And that 4% speedup is painful to watch.

It's not so hard to do either. You could capture it at 25 fps PAL, resize the frame to NTSC size, slow down the audio 4%, and author at 23.976 FPS.


Darryl

[FulciLives]

This is just the situation I had feared.

Granted my experience with PAL VHS animation is not high but every PAL VHS tape I have seen ... that was Japanese animation ... has been very poorly converted from 29.970fps NTSC to 25fps PAL and restoring that back to NTSC is often just not worth doing.

Of course this doesn't mean that all Japanese animation on PAL VHS suffers from a poor NTSC to PAL conversion.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[vhelp]

I've been reading this thread through, and I don't understand something.

If the user has a PAL vcr and is using it to transfer some PAL sources
to his pc, then what is problem here ??

It would seem correct to just setup the capture card to one of the PAL
formats and use 25 fps, and do a capture of the source. It would be PAL
all the way. Then, the user would MPEG encode it as PAL.

And, if the source *IS* PAL, then is the capture card being setup properly ??

capture card setup example..

** resolution: 352 or 720 x 576
** fps: 25

And, if the source is TRUE Film, then shouldn't the final captured frames in
his AVI reveal all progressive (though fields) ??

Otherwise, if the source is captured at 25 fps but reveal Interlaced frames,
then if I'm understanding in the PAL land, there is no such thing as a PAL
Telecine, only 25 fps (Interlace or Progressive) frames.

-vhelp 3949

[FulciLives]

I've been reading this thread through, and I don't understand something.

If the user has a PAL vcr and is using it to transfer some PAL sources
to his pc, then what is problem here ??

It would seem correct to just setup the capture card to one of the PAL
formats and use 25 fps, and do a capture of the source. It would be PAL
all the way. Then, the user would MPEG encode it as PAL.

And, if the source *IS* PAL, then is the capture card being setup properly ??

capture card setup example..

** resolution: 352 or 720 x 576
** fps: 25

And, if the source is TRUE Film, then shouldn't the final captured frames in
his AVI reveal all progressive (though fields) ??

Otherwise, if the source is captured at 25 fps but reveal Interlaced frames,
then if I'm understanding in the PAL land, there is no such thing as a PAL
Telecine, only 25 fps (Interlace or Progressive) frames.

-vhelp 3949

Well my understanding of the thread is that the idea here is to do a PAL to NTSC conversion. Now it seems the way that dj4monie wants to go about doing this is to play back the PAL VHS as PAL and capture as PAL but then convert to NTSC before burning to a DVD recordable.

I might add though ... it might just be easier to play back and capture as PAL but then also just make the DVD recordable in PAL and then buy a DVD player that can do PAL to NTSC conversion on-the-fly as that type of conversion is usually done rather well.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[vhelp]

Mind you, I'm still new to PAL materail.

If doing a PAL->NTSC conversion..

Ok. Still, there's no reason not to encode the PAL into an NTSC
after a few modifications to the source, like resizing to 720 x 480
( or keep it at 720 x 576 ) and encode it as such.

As an example of a PAL source that I process, this is how I attempted
the "Doctor Who" series, which is a PAL program, but is PAL->NTSC broadcast.
When I capture this source this way, I do the NTSC->PAL for the frame rate
part, and then I encode it to MPEG-2 inside TMPGenc using these params:

** 25 fps
** 720 x 480
** set to Interlace (not progressive)

Then, I author it to DVD disk. The result is a smooth playback, on account
of the setup for Interlace instead of Progressive. And, the reason why
I setup in this way is because not all the frames are perfectly cleaned up as
progressive, and in addition, seems to keep things sharper.

-vhelp 3951

[dj4monie]

Interesting....

I just thought when you did the conversion, part of it was setting it to NTSC defaults before encoding.

The STB DVD-R did a pretty good job for not being able to setup any of the bit rates or anything. I looks fine on any DVD player in the house, in fact it rivals the US released I got and those have some "miles" on them but still look pretty good.

I don't for see any problems with the conversion.

Side Note -

Now if I did say, just convert the VHS tape to say WMV, could I leave that in PAL and be able to play that back with say Winamp? It seems Winamp is region free as it just sees the files and not where's its from.

I haven't upgraded my main HD's yet, though I have some space on my Maxtor external drive. Its about 6 hours of video. I don't see a problem if I say made the conversion to WMV straight away.

Any more advice or tips?

[FulciLives]

Side Note -

Now if I did say, just convert the VHS tape to say WMV, could I leave that in PAL and be able to play that back with say Winamp? It seems Winamp is region free as it just sees the files and not where's its from.

I haven't upgraded my main HD's yet, though I have some space on my Maxtor external drive. Its about 6 hours of video. I don't see a problem if I say made the conversion to WMV straight away.

Any more advice or tips?

Well sometimes a PAL to NTSC conversion can be "tricky" to do ... other times (most times) it ain't no big deal.

I guess I was assuming from the get go that you wanted a NTSC DVD-R in the end.

Now you mention WMV and I don't know what to say other than why WMV ???

Also it sounds as if you have REGION CODE and VIDEO FORMAT confused. The REGION CODE is a DVD only thing that restricts world wide playback. For instance the UK is REGION 2 whereas the USA is REGION 1. Yes the UK is PAL and yes the USA is NTSC but that is the VIDEO FORMAT.

For instance Japan is NTSC but uses REGION 3 so even though the VIDEO FORMAT is the same as the USA (both NTSC) you cannot play a REGION 3 DVD in a REGION 1 USA DVD player.

If a PAL DVD is REGION FREE then you can play it in a USA REGION 1 DVD player IF that player can handle PAL. Some USA REGION 1 DVD players can actually play back PAL if the PAL is REGION FREE.

Anyways it sounds like you are doing captures from PAL VHS tapes so REGION CODE does not play into this at all.

Let's say you capture the PAL VHS as PAL and create a PAL DVD-R. That PAL DVD-R will be REGION FREE but will only play back on a USA REGION 1 DVD player that has the capability to handle PAL and convert to NTSC on-the-fly.

That would be one alternative. The other would be to capture the PAL VHS as PAL but then convert to a NTSC DVD-R but as I said above that might be a bit tricky to do in some cases especially in some cases where the PAL VHS is Japanese animation as I have seen a few PAL VHS tapes of Japanese animation that looked terrible due to a poor NTSC to PAL transfer. I mean the PAL would look bad on a PAL TV but sometimes that just is the way it is.

There are a couple of difference ways to convert PAL to NTSC. One way is to deinterlace the PAL and convert to a progressive NTSC source. You can either "cheat" the frame rate and leave it at 25fps and use DGPulldown OR you can slow the video down from 25fps to 23.976fps for a "real" conversion but that means you also have to adjust the running time of the audio.

The other option (which tends to work better with "mucked up" PAL interlaced sources) is to use Xesdeeni's 25i to 29.970i AviSynth scripts.

Xesdeeni's new website ---> CLICK HERE

Look for the section on PAL 25i to NTSC 29.970i ... this simply means INTERLACED 25fps PAL to INTERLACED 29.970fps NTSC.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I just noticed that Xesdeeni hasn't updated that section yet ... so instead you can use his method of 25i to 23.976p

[dj4monie]

Just to clear it up a bit -

The PAL version of Thunderbirds 2086 is the same version we got over here in the US when it was shown on Showtime in the early 80's.

Its not a "port" of say an originally boardcasted in Japan and then dubbed to english for the UK market.

This is a series dubbed for the US market as it was done by US english voice actors.

It was then converted to PAL for the UK market because ITC owned the property to not only the anime, but the entire Gerry Anderson Libary.

That's how I understand it. Its not a port of Gundam from Japan for the European market...

The STB DVD-R seemed to have no issues with, other than dropped frames which I will assume is tracking errors on the tape and not capture issues.

My goals -

1) Convert from PAL VHS to NTSC DVD for achiving

2) Then use the MPEG2 files made & compress them to Windows Media or Divx.

Since I have the whole Window Media Codec, I wanted to use that. It cost money to buy the Divx codec to get high quality playback.

Anybody got a decent write on making Menus with Studio 8-10?

[dphirschler]

John is wise. Listen to him.

I think what he is warning you about is the real possibility that your PAL tapes are not good conversions. By "not good conversion" I mean it may not be progressive. It would be some sort of blended field due to a realtime NTSC to PAL conversion process. The better way would have been to start from the original film (the progressive source), not the video tape (the telecined 3:2 pulldown). If starting with the progresive source, they would have simply sped it up 4% and gone progressive at 25 fps. Instead, some "pros" will just play back the interlaced video and realtime convert it to 25 fps. So you will be left with all kinds of blended fields. That would be ugly and near impossible to restore to progressive. And converting that back to NTSC would be an additional layer of ugliness... even if you used to 25i to 29.97i AviSynth scripts (which happen to be very good by the way). But that may be the only way.

Personally if I had the PAL source that was a bad NTSC conversion, I'd just author a PAL DVD and play it back on a DVD player capable of playing back PAL DVDs on an NTSC TV. My Pioneer does it, so it is not so rare.


Darryl

[dphirschler]

FWIW, the very rare Hong Kong LD of "Song of the South" is one of those bad conversions.


Darryl

[vhelp]

Hi faulks.

Excuse me, yet again, for butting in, but I'm interested ..

I'd like to understand a little bit more about this "bad conversion" when
talking about the assumption that the source program was put through a
PAL->NTSC conversion. I'm curious as to how the quality aspects look
when analizing the frames. The reason I ask in "curious George mode" is
mainily to see if this "blended'ness" is similar to the "Doctor Who"
series. If its that kind of bugged blend, then, as you guys were saying..
that its a tricky and messy job to undo or fix. I say imposible, but I
have somewhat settled with the RePAL() function (thanks to Manono for his
help in another thread for the tip) on the source program I am capturing.

I'd be interested in seeing some actual captured footage of those VHS
scenes, to understand the nature of your particular PAL situation more,
though.

-vhelp 3953

[FulciLives]

Hi faulks.

Excuse me, yet again, for butting in, but I'm interested ..

I'd like to understand a little bit more about this "bad conversion" when
talking about the assumption that the source program was put through a
PAL->NTSC conversion. I'm curious as to how the quality aspects look
when analizing the frames. The reason I ask in "curious George mode" is
mainily to see if this "blended'ness" is similar to the "Doctor Who"
series. If its that kind of bugged blend, then, as you guys were saying..
that its a tricky and messy job to undo or fix. I say imposible, but I
have somewhat settled with the RePAL() function (thanks to Manono for his
help in another thread for the tip) on the source program I am capturing.

I'd be interested in seeing some actual captured footage of those VHS
scenes, to understand the nature of your particular PAL situation more,
though.

-vhelp 3953

In the case of DOCTOR WHO you got a 25fps PAL source that was (from what I hear) badly converted to 29.970fps NTSC.

In the example that we are talking about I have merely brought up the example that I have often seen animation (done for NTSC) that has then been very poorly converted to PAL.

So we are talking NTSC to PAL (supposedly done professionally) and then taking the PAL and trying to convert back to NTSC.

Of course the PAL source in this situation may be just fine ...

I guess it boils down to this ...

dj4monie has a PAL VHS he wants to copy. He has a computer based capture system that can do NTSC and PAL but no way to play back the PAL VHS tape.

So buy a multi-system PAL VHS VCR. A multi-system 6-Head Hi-Fi Stereo VHS VCR by Toshiba can be bought for around $150 or less these days (I think $130 last time I checked).

So I think dj4monie needs to get a VCR of some sort and needs to do some captures.

After that the capture needs to be analyzed to see what is the best way to convert to NTSC.

Can't do more until we got some captured footage that can be analyzed ...

However we have suggested some methods but the best method relies upon the PAL footage and if it is progressive or interlaced and if interlaced how "badly" interlaced etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[dj4monie]

That is what I am doing, but now Im in the process of settling on a LCD that will power my media center.

The VCR will come up again in the next week or so. Maybe next pay period in 10 days. Like I said before Im considering that DVD/VCR player so I can do not only the T-Birds conversion but the Battle of The Planets as well.

I will do some captures soon however.

[FulciLives]

That is what I am doing, but now Im in the process of settling on a LCD that will power my media center.

The VCR will come up again in the next week or so. Maybe next pay period in 10 days. Like I said before Im considering that DVD/VCR player so I can do not only the T-Birds conversion but the Battle of The Planets as well.

I will do some captures soon however.

When you do the captures it might be a good idea to get a website (there are some free choices here) where you can post a "sample" clip. Captures are large so usually you have to make the sample very small ... like 10 seconds if not less ... but it would be helpfull to actually have a sample to view in order for me or anyone else to provide some tips on how to convert it to NTSC from PAL.

Please note that a PAL DVD can be ripped to a computer and then converted to a NTSC DVD-R so for PAL to NTSC you don't need to capture a DVD ... but I recall you saying you had PAL VHS so yes there is no way around doing a capture there first.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[dj4monie]

Back from the dead...

I got my LCD, but my ext drive took a dump and I need to send it to data recovery. Plus my trip to Europe is coming up and money needs to be saved for that. But I do have room to start this project.

I'll keep you posted...