Re: OT: NTSC VCR....?

[Doogie Brodie <ukhad@xxxxxxx>]

Nick Austin wrote:

>I'd don't have you're previous mail, so I'm not sure what the problem
>is that you are trying to solve.
>
>
The long and the short of it is, we're converting some stuff from 15
year old VHS to go onto DVD (capture card, video cleanup, audio cleanup,
mpeg, burn to disc - all PC based)... some of it is in PAL format, and
some in NTSC format... some of the caps worked fine, but some had a lot
of jittering due to the age and condition of the source tapes. To solve
this, I bought a basic time base corrector - £200 so not pro, but still
£200. The problem now is that the NTSC is output as PAL60 from the VCR,
which is fine when doing a straight cap, I tell the software that PAL60
is coming in, and the capture works, but when I need to use the TBC due
to the condition of the tape, it gets thrown by the PAL60... it auto
detects the stream as being PAL, but for some reason it puts a group of
lines across the top of the screen, which is too low down to just crop
off. If I switch to NTSC mode on the TBC, there is no problem with the
pictures, but the colours are in black & white due to the fact it's PAL
colours and the TBC thinks they're NTSC.

Once the captures are on the PC, I can encode as PAL, NTSC, etc but it's
the problem getting them on their to start with. I *think* if I get an
analogue PAL-> NTSC converter (around £50) which does the colours (and
lines....?) only, and put it before the TBC then I should be presenting
it with a valid NTSC signal, which it should then deal with no problems.
Alternatively, if I use a VCR that outputs NTSC rather than PAL60, I
wouldn't have the problem, but from what I've seen NTSC output is only
available on multi-standard players around the £400 mark.... worst case,
I'd probably be more inclined to import a bargain basement VCR from the
states and get a voltage changer, if the analogue converter won't do the
job.

>PAL60 has the vertical characteristics of NTSC and the horizontal
>characteristics of PAL.  TV's can usually stretch themselves enough to
>produce a watchable picture.  Try to feed a PAL60 signal into anything
>else (e.g. another VCR in record mode) and it won't work.
>
>
Is that not partially due to the difference in frequency as well?

>Because video is a delivery mechanism (Camera to transmitter,
>transmitter to TV).  It was never designed to be stored or processed.
>The situation we arrive at today where storage and processing are cheap
>are widely available is the result of many decades of R&D effort
into
>solving these problems.  Unfortunately consumers don't buy standards
>converters, so these remain expensive.
>
>
Thanks for your detailed response :)

--
Doogie



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