Capturing PAL with NTSC camera

wufred wrote on 6/4/2007, 8:03 PM
I am in the US and have a DCR-HC85 that records and plays in NTSC. My friend in Singapore sent me some PAL tapes for editing. What is the best way to edit these tapes?
I am using V6. My camera plays the tapes on the camera monitor with no problem. I am capturing usin a Firewire. I couldn't get my V6 capture to work so I used Windows media player to capture as avi files. After a test edit and save project. i found that on re-opening the project all the audio is gone, the video has been automatically rendered?
Please advise on both topics. Thanks in advance

Comments

farss wrote on 6/4/2007, 8:48 PM
Closing and opening a project doesn't cause anything to get rendered.
How did you use WMP to capture?
The best way to edit PAL is on a PAL timeline or else convert all the footage to NTSC (plenty of posts on this will be found via a search) and then edit the NTSC footage on a NTSC timeline.

Sometime's you'll find cameras and VCRs will play things out the A/V ports but will not feed the same video down the firewire connection. Also what you get out the A/V ports might not be true NTSC or PAL but rather a bit of a jumbled mix of the two standards in which case trying to use an A->D converter to capture from the A/V will be equally fruitless.

If all else fails, beg, borrow, rent or steal a DSR-11, it has switch on the back so you can do either NTSC or PAL. Failing that a Z1 can be fired up in either 50i or 60i and used to capture SD PAL or NTSC. Note that none of thhese devices convert between the two standards.

Bob.
gjesion wrote on 6/5/2007, 4:09 AM
You may be in luck. I had the same situation with a PAL tape from India and my PD170. Some Sony's will play PAL tapes just fine, but will not send them out firewire if device control is enabled. (When device control is enabled the camera apparently defaults to NTSC.) Try setting the capture program to no device control then connect the camera start the capture then the camera. On my PD170 this resulted in a perfectly usable PAL AVI that I then used VV to convert to NTSC.

Regards,
Jerry
wufred wrote on 6/5/2007, 8:03 AM
Bob and Jerry, thank you for your replies.
I could not get my V6 to find my camera so I used Windows Movie maker to capture my PAL tapes. I configured WMM to make avi formated files, but indeed what came out was probably a mumble jumble of a file. It did not have a file extension and when I tried to render it to an avi format, the rendering hanged up many times and at different places everytime.
So I finally re-downloaded my older V5 from Sony, and it captured my tapes rather uneventfully and into avi files that I could edit. I kept everything in PAL, the clips and the timeline. So far, things look OK.
I am hitting a problem though. After some editing in V6, I saved the project as a .veg file. Turned off the computer and then later relaunched V6 and my veg project. V6 immediately started rendering my project. I ended up with a single pair of rendered video and audio tracks instead of the multiple tracks that I originally saved the project with. This posed a "slight" problem, I can't go back to tweek my edited tracks and some of my unedited tracks got screwed up by the unexpected rendering. Have you seen this before ?
Jerry, it looks like that I did get PAL tracks from the pixel size and the frame rate from the properties of the clip. But, on my next break, I think i will try to turn off the device control and capture a few clips just to make sure that I am OK
Thanks guys.