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  1. Hope I am in the right 'town' here for my question.
    What I want to do is this. Play a VHS vdo on my player ( it's in PAL format ) and capture it into the computer. That I can do. Save as avi etc.
    Next part is to output to VCD on CD for PC playback. Again I can do using various methods.
    Next part is my problem. I also want to convert the PAL VDO to NTSC and output that to *VHS* not to VCD or shall I say PC format.
    So that I can offer a choice of VCD to computer users and NTSC to my elderly USA clients who don't have computer but do have a VHS player and TV in the NTSC format.
    How can I achieve this ?
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  2. Hey there,

    I need to know this one to. I have a question about it as well on this site.
    I hope we get some answers.

    SladeZero
    Best advice to give is to give no advice at all :)
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  3. I guess you have already ruled out using a commercial service for doing the conversion. Of course that depends on how much and how often you would require the service.

    The way I see it, you have two separate problems:
    1. Getting a recorder that can record in NTSC format
    2. Converting CCIR-601/PAL video to NTSC format

    You can't solve problem #1 without getting some new hardware. The best solution would be to buy a multistandard converting recorder that can both record and convert between NTSC and PAL solving both problems at one go. This is unfortunately also the most expensive solution, as problem #2 is not easy(=cheap) to solve well and the market for these devices is not very wide.

    A cheaper solution would be to ask your relatives to buy and send you an inexpensive NTSC VCR. You probably need to buy a voltage converter as well. This means you have to solve problem #2 yourself with your computer.

    A simple and crude way would be just to output NTSC signal with your TV-out while playing the video. In low-motion scenes this is not too bad but high-motion ones will look terrible. If you don't have access to a high-end motion-vector-analysing frame rate converter software, the el-cheapo way to do acceptable conversion would be following:

    1. Capture your content
    2. Deinterlace if necessary
    3. Resize to 480 vertical resolution
    4. Slow down video and audio from the 25 fps material down to 23.976 fps
    5. Encode to MPEG-2
    6. Add 3:2 pulldown with pulldown.exe or similar tool
    7. Play back as NTSC with a hardware player that respects pulldown flags. Sigma Designs' Hollywood+ would be ideal, but most DVD standalones playing (x)SVCD will do as well.
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  4. RemoteCtrl is right, you have two separate issues:

    1. digital - converting captured PAL to NTSC
    2. analog - converting digital NTSC to analog NTSC

    The method RemoteCtrl suggests for conversion is the method best used for film source. You would essentially be reversing the process that is used to convert film to PAL video.

    But this is not the best method if your source is actually video. In that case, I would suggest an approach designed for interlaced video. I posted a script a while back (http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=90816) that works very well (but you may have to tweak it a bit to get the field polarity right). It only operates on the video, so there is no processing of the audio necessary at all. [I also have an updated and faster version that I will hopefully be posting soon (the tools needed are not available yet).]

    Once your video is converted and on your PC, I can think of several things you could do:

    1. Use a TV-out card and record the results on a VCR.
    2. Create an NTSC DVD/SVCD/VCD which can be played on an NTSC DVD player and recorded onto a VCR.
    3. Export the video to an NTSC digital camcorder (via IEEE-1394) which can be recorded onto a VCR.

    Of course, you could create an NTSC DVD/SVCD/VCD and provide that to your NTSC customers, and avoid the analog issue altogether.

    Xesdeeni
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