Capturing NTSC 8mm tapes comes out as PAL

CrazyRussian wrote on 6/8/2003, 6:47 PM
I have number of tapes recorded with Sony camcorder on Hi8 tapes. The camera on which tapes were orignaly made is old and gone. Now I have Sony Digital8 camcorder which is capable of playing Hi8 tapes, it also has digital out, so when you play Hi8 tapes on it it converts it to DV. I've tried capturing these tapes in Vegas, and weird things happening: it records them in PAL some times. That's right, some times. I have tried capturing same episod numer of times, and result is always different: sometimes entire clip captured as NTSC, some times entire clip captured as PAL, SOMETIMES capture utility brakes it into more than one clip - some PAL, some NTSC. Does anyone know why and how to prevent it from doing that? Is there a setting or option to set capture utility to capture in NTSC only? For now I use my Canopus ADVC converter: I connect analog out from camera to analog in of ADVC, and then digital out of ADVC to FireWire card on my PC - having done that everthing comes out right: NTSC, but i clearly see loss of quality.
Can i set capture utility to capture only in NTSC??? Where and how? And why would it swith video standards on the same tape, even on the same clip???

Comments

CrazyRussian wrote on 6/8/2003, 9:39 PM
I found what I was doing wrong: you need to pre-rall, problem goes away if you pre-roll. Easy. Let tape stabilze and sync before you start capturing
jboy wrote on 6/9/2003, 1:16 PM
Why are you using the converter ? The digital8 should convert hi8 to digital automatically-(unless you have the entry level model, which doesn"t have this feature).
RBartlett wrote on 6/9/2003, 3:34 PM
CrazyRussian tried the ADVC converter to sectionalize where the problem was with the camera. He was originally using the cameras digitizer. I'm surprised that if the path between camera and ADVC unit was SVIDEO, that the quality would have been lower. Perhaps the Canopus unit isn't that marvellous?

Anyway, the Sony camcorders for 8mm/Hi8 playback on Digital8 decks isn't restricted from the low end. Sony have removed the 8mm/Hi8 features from all of these cameras, as miniDV is heading into this space and it has to cut costs. The Digital8 DV-walkmans still have it. That is progress for you.

Interesting about the pre-roll CrazyRussian, I guess play-pause-capture-play works too?
RBartlett wrote on 6/9/2003, 3:34 PM
CrazyRussian tried the ADVC converter to sectionalize where the problem was with the camera. He was originally using the cameras digitizer. I'm surprised that if the path between camera and ADVC unit was SVIDEO, that the quality would have been lower. Perhaps the Canopus unit isn't that marvellous?

Anyway, the Sony camcorders for 8mm/Hi8 playback on Digital8 decks isn't restricted from the low end. Sony have removed the 8mm/Hi8 features from all of these cameras, as miniDV is heading into this space and it has to cut costs. The Digital8 DV-walkmans still have it. That is progress for you.

Interesting about the pre-roll CrazyRussian, I guess play-pause-capture-play works too?
RBartlett wrote on 6/9/2003, 3:34 PM
CrazyRussian tried the ADVC converter to sectionalize where the problem was with the camera. He was originally using the cameras digitizer. I'm surprised that if the path between camera and ADVC unit was SVIDEO, that the quality would have been lower. Perhaps the Canopus unit isn't that marvellous?

Anyway, the Sony camcorders for 8mm/Hi8 playback on Digital8 decks isn't restricted from the low end. Sony have removed the 8mm/Hi8 features from all of these cameras, as miniDV is heading into this space and it has to cut costs. The Digital8 DV-walkmans still have it. That is progress for you.

Interesting about the pre-roll CrazyRussian, I guess play-pause-capture-play works too?
CrazyRussian wrote on 6/9/2003, 6:04 PM
Well, after I posted the question, I continued searching this forum for anything similar to my problem, and found a post by SonicEPM stating something to this nature (sorry didnt bookmark the post and dont remember exact wording), "when you capture DV make sure you have clean feed BEFORE you start capturing", this is because when video starts, reading device "hunting for sync and might output garbage frames some marked as PAL". This applied to me this way: I was capturing by stopping camcorder at the start position, and then clicking "Capture" which was starting playback and beginging capture. So I assume at the time camcorder starts and ouput couple of frames, Vegas was determening what format video is in, and sometimes was getting wrong parameters. Now I capture this way: rewind about 10 sec of video before the start point, start playback, when video comes to the point I need to capture, I click "Capture"... everything work perfect. Though I do get some drop frames, anyone knows why? It's not the system, 'cause it's dual Xeon 2.4 with 2 gig of ram and RAID 0 over 2 controllers with 10 hard drives... I get no drop frames feeding it through Canopus ADVC, but get about 10 dropped frames for every 20 min captured for feed from camcorder. Any info is appreciated.
And yes, my camcorder has digital out, and thats where i was getting formas mixed up from
jboy wrote on 6/10/2003, 2:04 PM
I never lose frames capturing in Vegas thru my sony trv720-(2 ghz amd box/raid w/2 120 gb drives), but you shouldn't be dropping frames even with a single drive. Sounds like you have a very complicated setup-maybe thats the problem, though I cant figure why the converter should make a difference..