FredThompson
16th June 2003, 08:25
To set this up:
I've been talking with the author of WinDV about reading/writing PAL/NTSC regardless of camcorder format. The idea is that at the firewire level, a camcorder is really just a streaming tape drive. The vast majority of DV access on PCs is done through the M$ interface which is locking in the format, I think. There's a real good thread about PAL<->NTSC here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35387
Well, no promises but look at these:
http://www.geocities.com/fredthompson6/Screenshots/NTSC_DV_Tape_retrieved_as_PAL.png
http://www.geocities.com/fredthompson6/Screenshots/NTSC_DV_Tape_retrieved_as_PAL_DV_2.png
http://www.geocities.com/fredthompson6/Screenshots/PALDVfromNTSCsource.avi
Source is an NTSC DV tape made from the S-Video feed of an NTSC DirecTV receiver.
I was pulling from the tape during a heavy thunderstorm. There were some flashes in the preview screen and the cover is off that computer. Somehow, the system decided the tape is PAL. I've kept the entire retrieved segment and am going back to the tape to find where the segment came from. The tape is perfectly NTSC. It was made a while ago and all the other segments I grabbed are NTSC.
Camcorder is a Canon ZR25MC. Retrieved segment reports 720x576x25fps. The scrambled image is Media Player from the beginning of the retreived segment. The AVI is a VirtualDub partial and it does play.
Granted, I cannot duplicate what has happened. However, it sure does make it seem possible to pull PAL from NTSC equipment.
FWIW, the author of WinDV got the NTSC tape I've sent him:
I've received the tape from you rigth now.
When played using my Canon PAL DV camcorder, the picture is garbled, unsynchronized, and the sound going from the camcorder has nothing to do with recorded sound. It's how I expected it to be. The good thing is, it seems the data are going through the firewire.
Now I have to configure my linux system for DV Firewire tests, and then I'll see if the NTSC DV video could be restored from the FireWire stream, or not.
However, I'm currently so busy with three projects, all of them in big hurry, so probably one week or more I cannot make experiments with this NTSC tape.
Petr M.
If he's able to provide a way to read/write either PAL or NTSC to DV, it can probably also be done with Digital8 as they're, essentially, the same thing at the firewire level.
I've been talking with the author of WinDV about reading/writing PAL/NTSC regardless of camcorder format. The idea is that at the firewire level, a camcorder is really just a streaming tape drive. The vast majority of DV access on PCs is done through the M$ interface which is locking in the format, I think. There's a real good thread about PAL<->NTSC here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35387
Well, no promises but look at these:
http://www.geocities.com/fredthompson6/Screenshots/NTSC_DV_Tape_retrieved_as_PAL.png
http://www.geocities.com/fredthompson6/Screenshots/NTSC_DV_Tape_retrieved_as_PAL_DV_2.png
http://www.geocities.com/fredthompson6/Screenshots/PALDVfromNTSCsource.avi
Source is an NTSC DV tape made from the S-Video feed of an NTSC DirecTV receiver.
I was pulling from the tape during a heavy thunderstorm. There were some flashes in the preview screen and the cover is off that computer. Somehow, the system decided the tape is PAL. I've kept the entire retrieved segment and am going back to the tape to find where the segment came from. The tape is perfectly NTSC. It was made a while ago and all the other segments I grabbed are NTSC.
Camcorder is a Canon ZR25MC. Retrieved segment reports 720x576x25fps. The scrambled image is Media Player from the beginning of the retreived segment. The AVI is a VirtualDub partial and it does play.
Granted, I cannot duplicate what has happened. However, it sure does make it seem possible to pull PAL from NTSC equipment.
FWIW, the author of WinDV got the NTSC tape I've sent him:
I've received the tape from you rigth now.
When played using my Canon PAL DV camcorder, the picture is garbled, unsynchronized, and the sound going from the camcorder has nothing to do with recorded sound. It's how I expected it to be. The good thing is, it seems the data are going through the firewire.
Now I have to configure my linux system for DV Firewire tests, and then I'll see if the NTSC DV video could be restored from the FireWire stream, or not.
However, I'm currently so busy with three projects, all of them in big hurry, so probably one week or more I cannot make experiments with this NTSC tape.
Petr M.
If he's able to provide a way to read/write either PAL or NTSC to DV, it can probably also be done with Digital8 as they're, essentially, the same thing at the firewire level.