Questions about Digital8 analogue output
 

Hi, first let me say thank you for making this great forum! I'm trying to digitize some old Video8/Hi8 family tapes which are in both NTSC and PAL, and this has been a priceless resource.

I've purchased and am waiting for the arrival of a DCR-TRV620E and a Hauppauge USB-Live2 for this, as from my understanding the DCR-TRV620E should be able to play Video8/Hi8 in PAL and NTSC, whereby the S-Video output for NTSC tapes will be in either PAL60 or NTSC 4.43.

I have two questions about my planned setup:

1. Will the USB-Live2 be able to capture PAL60 or NTSC 4.43? I believe so, but I can only find people talking about PAL or NTSC capture.

2. After the head reads a Video8/Hi8 tape, it is digitized at some point in order to output it to FireWire. Is the S-Video output "directly" taken from the tape, or is it a digital to analogue conversion of the digitized video?

Thanks!

I am not sure whether the cards support those formats or not. It may depend on the driver as well.

On the older Hi8 cameras, the TBC/DNR does not work when playing back NTSC tapes, I don't know if this is the case on the Analog playback capable D8 cameras or not as I haven't had a working one for a while.

The Video does go through a analog-to-digital conversion in the camera if the TBC and/or DNR function is active, as those things operate in the digital domain. I am not sure otherwise, haven't studied the schematics in detail. It is in any case not DV compressed like what you will get from the firewire.

What I've personally have done with NTSC tapes as someone in PAL-land, is pass the video through a Pioneer DVR-440H DVD recorder to use it's TBC-ish functionality as we lack a native NTSC camera with TBC. This and a number of related models support PAL60 and NTSC-4.43 and outputs it as normal NTSC. It's not quite as solid as the build-in TBC, or a panasonic DMR-ES10 though and can occasionally give some left-right movement if the video is really unstable. The PAL model DMR-ES10 does not support PAL60. It may support NTSC 4.43, but I haven't tested, I only know it supports normal NTSC output.