Just a thought (and a question): Film look with PAL at PTT on a NTSC cam...

FuTz wrote on 5/26/2004, 8:22 AM
I just thought about something but I don't know if it's feasible...
If I buy the soon to be released HD cam from Sony but in PAL, which records at 25fps. I know I can work inside Vegas with the footage, etc...
But since, at the moment of printing to tape, the cam will record "1"s and "0"s, would I be able to record that HD PAL stuff onto a normal NTSC cam?

What I'm trying to do here is getting close to 24fps since this Sony HD cam doesn't have a 24fps option...

Yeah, I know I could buy the Pana100 cam, I know...

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:12 AM
My gut instinct tells me that the NTSC camera will reject the stream as not being a valid NTSC signal. It may only be "1"s and "0"s at the base level, but the stream of bits has to conform to certain standards and include certain patterns for the camera to accept it as valid data.
FuTz wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:21 AM
yeah but if the properties for PTT is "standard NTSC DV" ? I guess it will do the "pull up", no ?
Chienworks wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:23 AM
Yes, and all the other necessary conversions too. By default it will probably resample and blend frames rather than pull up. You may have to set that explicitly.
BrianStanding wrote on 5/27/2004, 8:06 AM
I think FuTz is right. I think Vegas will do the conversion, and you'll end up with an NTSC-compliant tape.

A while back I had a friend from Australia visit with his PAL Sony PD-150. We took the opportunity to test out a couple of things with his camera and my NTSC model PD-150.

We took a PAL DV tape, put it in the PAL camera, as the PLAY deck. Then we did a firewire dub to the NTSC cam (RECORD deck). As best as we could determine, the result was a PAL DV tape, exactly like the original.
We tried it in reverse, too. This time, the PAL camera produced an NTSC-compliant tape.

(By the way, both cameras could play back either PAL or NTSC material just fine on their attached LCD monitor, with audio. However, when we attached an external monitor to the analog outs, we got a garbled image if we were using the opposite standard.)

I think when you are doing a firewire dub (as opposed to recording something off the camera's CCD sensors) it works exactly like a digital file copy in a computer. You get an EXACT copy of the original file, and your camera or deck doesn't really care what format it's originally in.

FuTz wrote on 5/27/2004, 4:46 PM
Wow, this is good news.
I asked cause if I ever had to buy another cam right now, even if I'm in Canada (NTSC) I'd *at least* try a PAL cam to compare the results regarding a possible "film look". At least, the image speed would be something set if it worked. I'd probably rent a cam for a few days to check before buying of course.

Thanks for your comments everyone. This was just a question that crossed my mind after reading a few articles about film look and knowing that Sony was soon releasing (if it ain't at this time) a new HD cam (kind of boosted PD170) that doesn't have the 24fps like the Panasonic has.
If it works, I can in fact choose from all the brands...Canon wouldn't be a bad choice at all either and I hear so many good things about their cams that I'd suuuure be tempted... and I wouldn't have problems sending tapes to friends in Europe ...