capture of ntsc video. with virtualvcr

[MarioGarcia]

hello
I am trying to capture an ntsc tape that is being read in a vcr bought it belgium
but I don't know what settings choose? i tried to use pal_60 but I don't know what colour space use? and what resolution? what framerate? yuv2 doesn't seem to work well! is there any special settings?
if i choose ntsc i get black and white picture, to get some colour i need to choose pal _60
I am using virtualvcr.
i also am trying to cap some pal vhs from australia? what's the pal format from australia? there are pal_b to pal _h what to choose?
thanks in advance for your help.

[mic]

I'm in the US, so I can only report what I've read... My understanding is that dual format vcrs used in Europe play NTSC but output PAL or modified PAL -- the modified part can be a pain, & I think your settings will depend in part on the vcr you're using. Definitely need to capture PAL -- I've read others have just used std. PAL settings for resolution, but I've heard of sometimes having to crop the frame.

I have seen a lot of posts about this sort of thing in the Vegas forums at SOFO/SONY, so I'd definitely suggest some searching there.

[MarioGarcia]

i am using indeed a pal vcr that reads ntsc tapes
there are terms i don't understand though. what is std pal settings? what's 'crop the frame'?
what's the full ntsc resolutions? for pal is 768 x576 but for ntsc? what is it?
thank you lads :)

[mic]

Sorry -- just being lazy writing std. instead of standard. Meant your 768 x 576 frames.

NTSC is 720 x 480. It's based on 60 cycles (60 fields) per second, and the colors are stored differently.

What makes it a bit interesting :) you're not really dealing with frames and stuff, but video signals inside your vcr. Electronics will take a signal it gets from reading the NTSC tape, and convert it into a signal that will play on your PAL TV.

Now TVs (the one's that use picture tubes) don't show you the full picture like you see on your PC. You don't see any of the edges, so there's no problem if some of the edges are black, left empty when your vcr converts the signal. If you want to display this video on a PC, where the edges show, you might cut off the black edges, which is *cropping* the picture.

Since your vcr should be sending out a PAL signal for your TV, capturing and dealing with it *should* be no different then capturing from a PAL tape or broadcast. Unfortunately, I've heard from other's that the vcr's output may not be pure PAL, may not be completely in your PAL specs. That could explain it if your results are different then other, *normal* PAL captures. You might be dealing with something that's a hybrid, not really NTSC or PAL. :(

Adding an afterthought...
if you were planning on doing this a lot, I have heard of NTSC vcrs & tape decks that run on your voltage -- & shouldn't be a big deal to run a US machine off a power invertor (cheap device that converts 12.v DC battery power to US, 60 cycle AC). I've read of some folks doing this anyway, and capturing NTSC video to their PC, where they did the conversion.

At that point, if you had NTSC video on your PC, would use V/Dub to resize the frame to 864 x 576, crop (cut off) the sides to 768. At the same time encoding it would convert the color space, and you would use filters to deinterlace (& IVT if necessary) to get good content that could be encoded to 25 fps. [NTSC will always be interlaced, and if based originally on film at 24 fps, it will have extra in-between frames added that you remove by ivt] [if you're really interested in top quality, Vegas Supersampling *might* help during fps conversion, but takes a looooooooong time]

[Mug Funky]

australia i think is PAL G (or is it B?).

my guess with your NTSC tape is you'll have to manually set up the VCR to output NTSC 3.58, because your capture device wont know how to handle anything else (like NTSC 4.43 or PAL 60). the VCR i've been capping on lately is a JVC model and outputs "NTSC PB" (PB = playback? this is possibly PAL 60) by default every time a new tape is inserted. i have to set it to NTSC 3.58 to get colour.

btw, VHS is not a good source... especially colour NTSC. you can get good results with B&W NTSC if you have a clean tape and a TBC, but that's not for everyone... i've had to work off 3rd genration dubs before, and that's not pretty - you can count the generations from the junk lines at the bottom of the screen, just like rings on a tree.

[MarioGarcia]

my vcr doesn't have any options to manage the output. and you are right, i don't have a first generation tape, it's old and it's a copy of another tape of television broadcast or amateur shots from concerts and other performances.
what does TBC mean?

[mic]

Absolute easiest way out would be if you had relatives in the US -- they could take tape to a pharmacy like Walgreens & have the tape transferred to DVD. :p

[MarioGarcia]

pal 60 gives color picture but jumpy..
ntsc gives stable picture but desaturated (black and white)
no relatives in the USA sadly
what's the frame rate that i should chooce for pal 60? 30.000 fps? 25.000? 27.970?
i noticed that if i watch it in dscaler.. the picture doesn't jump; it's only when I try to cap it that the image degrades.
thank you all for your help.
mario

[mic]

Really, REALLY guessing...

If you can capture PAL broadcast TV OK, but not from your vcr playing an ntsc tape, then there's probably a mismatch between what your PC is expecting and what the vcr is giving it.

If that guess is correct, then logically there should be 2 ways I think to correct it.

1) Put the vcr's output into specs, maybe by using one of those video enhancers, maybe by passing the signal through a camcorder or another PAL vcr, possibly by recording the output from one vcr (the one with the ntsc tape) with another strictly PAL vcr, and capturing that 2nd tape.

2) Change the PC's capture so it doesn't mind the input. Different capture software works in different ways... Some apps work similar to a screen capture program, capturing and saving the contents of the video window, while others work with the stream from the capture hardware. Something like Nerovision or one of the Cyberlink programs (available as trial) might work saving to an mpg2 file. AVI_IO might work -- it will save at any FPS I think, though you might have to do a bit of trial and error.

Trying different capture codecs and codec settings might help. Using rgb (not normally a good choice) instead of one of the *y* color models might force a conversion, help if the problem is the color in the input stream isn't in spec.

But at the end of the day, just guessing... :(

[MarioGarcia]

what are the names of 'those video enhancers'
are you talking about powervcr? cyberlink trial?

[mic]

what are the names of 'those video enhancers'

I'm not sure which brands are available locally for you. Ambico (spelling?) and a couple of other manufacturers of video accessories produce them for enhancing video clarity from poor tape etc. Many folks use them to bypass macrovision on VHS tapes. I don't know European return policies, but in the US it would be no big deal to return one if it didn't help. As their purpose is to take a weak or out of spec signal and put it into spec, might indeed help. In the US of it helps, I've seen them go from $30 to $100.

are you talking about powervcr? cyberlink trial?

Yes... Folks buying something like Vegas w/DVDA or Prem & the Adobe DVD app expect a lot of mpg2 encoding control & features. At the lower end programs like Nero Vision or the Cyberlink programs (they have producer software too) are tailored for the average user, who might have all sorts of capture hardware, and is generally not expected to know or care much about such things.

My reasoning is that this sort of program is probably not too fussy about hardware or signals being exactly right, because if it were, they'd spend a fortune on complaints and support. I have in fact come across a few posts here and there about hardware that would only capture well with this sort of program.

At any rate, might be worth a shot downloading.

[zilog jones]

what's the frame rate that i should chooce for pal 60? 30.000 fps? 25.000? 27.970?

PAL-60 is still the same resolution and field rate as normal NTSC - therefore you should be using whateverx480 (e.g. 720x480) at 29.97fps. The only difference is the colour system, which is just PAL instead of NTSC. Most good modern PAL TVs have no problem with this kind of picture.

I don't know of any VHS VCRs that do a 60->50Hz standards conversion (some newer more expensive ones may do though), and if they did they would undoubtedly look awful (like some DVD players that do it).

1) Put the vcr's output into specs...possibly by recording the output from one vcr (the one with the ntsc tape) with another strictly PAL vcr, and capturing that 2nd tape.
That probably won't work. I've tried recording PAL-60 video on PAL VHS recorders before, and the VCR just couldn't sync to the signal properly - it was really jerky and unstable.