Vidcap: NTSC Becomes PAL

fldave wrote on 9/7/2006, 10:41 AM
Strange. I just captured a borrowed standard 8mm tape I recorded a year ago on a borrowed camera. It had previous footage on it that I recorded over. This the USA, so I assumed the camera was NTSC (didn't think about it, actually, I always do NTSC).

Captured fine, cap window showed footage, cam (Sony TRV 310 Digital 8) screen looked good, footage appeared on media pool after it was over. Put on timeline, jumbled blocky mess. Fiddled with Vegas a bit, then noticed the media properties said PAL DV (720x576, 25.000 fps). Set the project to that, still a jumbled mess.

Could the previous footage been PAL and fooled Vidcap? Since it is standard 8mm, do I need to recapture it before the cam can do a conversion for output to firewire? I have a bunch of standard 8 tapes from previous cams but haven't transferred any on the computer yet.

Comments

YesMaestro wrote on 9/7/2006, 10:55 AM
The same thing happened to me awhile back with a minidv tape and the only way to get around it was to use Scenalyzer to capture the tape. I'm guessing there was something garbage in the signal that threw Vidcap into a confused state.
Scenalyzer

Paul
Tim L wrote on 9/7/2006, 1:17 PM
It's happened to me perhaps three times, using Vegas Movie Studio (might be the same vidcap program though).

NTSC picture looked fine in the preview window while capturing, but captured avi file showed up as PAL format after capture, and image was all blocky and messed up.

All three times, I was capturing a clip that had empty, unrecorded tape in front of it. I started capture with "snow" on the screen, just before the clip appeared. Subsequent clips in the same capture, I believe, (using scene detection) came in properly as NTSC.

I think I simply recaptured the messed up clips, making sure to start the capture just after the video picture appeared, then worked out ok.

Tim L
technobaba wrote on 9/7/2006, 2:57 PM
A little info:
I had an old Sony that would play back PAL but only record in NTSC. i.e. you could play back either Pal or NTSC but I remember that one model of sony (a friends) would capture (PAL) and one would not. (block mess).

fldave wrote on 9/10/2006, 8:46 PM
Thanks all. Just back from New York, will try again tomorrow. I thought the problem sounded recently familiar.
SeaJohn2 wrote on 9/10/2006, 10:49 PM
This is a long-standing Vegas Capture bug. (I'm sure it's been fixed in Vegas 7 *snicker*).

If your capture happens to start out at a noisy spot, then Vegas will sometimes get confused and decide your NTSC footage is some hybrid PAL/NTSC weirdness. Of course, it doesn't bother telling you this until AFTER your capture is complete.

As mentioned above, your best bet is to use Scenalizer or even just Windows Movie Maker for your captures.
fldave wrote on 5/1/2007, 8:30 PM
Fixed in Vegas 7.0e?

Fixed a DV video capture issue that could cause captured NTSC clips to be misidentified as PAL.
Fixed a DV video capture issue that could prevent starting timecode from being detected.


Thanks, Sony Creative! One less thing to think about! I know several other people had this issue since I did.
John_Cline wrote on 5/1/2007, 10:54 PM
"I'm sure it's been fixed in Vegas 7 *snicker*"

*snicker* It has been fixed in v7. Are you happy now?

I had this issue once and it was because I started capturing before the video data had begun on the tape.