Recorded in PAL, digitize on an american DV cam?

Z

zulubeached

Member
Hello everybody,

I brought my PAL DVX to university in the US. However, to save wear & tear on the heads, I'd like to purchase an inexpensive MiniDV-cam as deck. Unfortunately I am now in NTSC-land, so will digitizing a PAL tape in an NTSC-MiniDV-cam (by Firewire to my NLE) work?

Best regards,

Sebastian
 
No. You would need a camera or deck specifically capable of playing a PAL tape. (The Sony DSR-11 is an example. It will play either NYSC or PAL, though it cannot be used as a pass through standards converter). You will also need to edit in the PAL format. If you wish to display your work on a TV/Monitor it must be capable of displaying PAL. Simply feeding a PAL signal into an NTSC device or through firewire will not convert it.

Beyond this you could pay someone to run your footage through a standards converter and make NTSC copies, or capture in PAL and use software (such as Canopus Procoder) to transcode the PAL files into NTSC files - then edit in NTSC.
 
Actually, I dont want to convert it - I just would like to keep it all PAL, only utilizing the cam to read the PAL data and send it just the way it is over firewire into my NLE... would that be possible?
 
As long as the playback device can play PAL and your NLE is set to edit in PAL, then yes. Walking into a store and buying a cheap PAL camcorder in the US is another matter.
 
Right -- I don't know if there are any cheap cameras that play back both formats. A deck is your best bet. The cheapest dual-standard deck is probably the JVC BR-DV3000, at around $1500.
 
just curious, has anyone actually tried this to see if it does or doesn't work????

there's probably some very important reason why it wouldn't, but given my microscopic knowlede of the miniDV spec, i would have assumed that asking the camcorder to pull a DV bitstream off the tape and shove it down the firewire port should work irrespective of the actual content or format of the eventual analogue picture specification ... i would have thought all the picture information would be buried well inside the DV bits and frames and blocks.

you're not asking it to display, encode, or convert PAL, just spin the tape heads.

would be a good experiment for someone with both cameras and could save this guy a grand into the bargain.
 
Haven't tried it on more recent cameras, but I have tried playing back PAL tapes in the older Sony cameras (like the VX1000 and TRV8) and it's a complete no-go.

I'd try it on the DVX but I just sold my deck (raising money for the HD100 & HVX!) So if anyone has a dual-format deck (like a JVC BR-DV3000, a Panasonic DV2500, or a Sony DSR-11) they could run this test quickly -- just put the deck in PAL mode and generate a PAL file from their NLE and output that to tape. Then pop that PAL tape in the NTSC DVX and try to digitize from it...
 
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