NTSC Hi8 tape, captures to PAL DVD?
 

Hi guys,

I've recently been capturing some of my own old Video8 tapes, and a family friend asked me to get 3 of their old Hi8 tapes onto DVD. I've done some odd VHS bits in the past but this is the first time I'm trying to do it "properly" as it were.

I captured to Huffyuv YUY2 using AmaRecTV using a Tevion USB capture device that seems fairly well regarded, as I had good results with this setup in the past. The tapes had been stored in a very humid place so aren't great and have odd dropouts in places, but the captures have come out fairly well overall.

I've done a little cleanup and trimming with VirtualDub and Audacity (mostly Audio as I'm OK with that, video I'm not great and I seemed to be making it worse) but I captured in 640x480. The tapes were originally recorded by them in NTSC on a USA camera, but we're in the UK so I now want to get these onto DVD in a PAL resolution if I can.

I've had a good read around and seem to have found varying answers, the common thing being to resize to 720x576. My confusion comes when people are talking about de-interlacing first then re-interlacing, but I've also seen some comments that de-interlacing causes image quality issues, so I'm not sure how to proceed.

Apologies if this seems like a very basic problem, but I'm not even sure if the resizing will be entirely necessary and how to do it properly, and I'd like to do the best I can with this. I may end up posting in other forums yet for help with improving video up a little.

Thanks very much.

Almost all PAL DVD players sold in PAL countries play both PAL and NTSC for viewing on TV. NTSC and PAL DVD are usually interlaced.

Not quite. :wink2:

PAL players play NTSC as a quasi-NTSC signal, similar to "NTSC-50" (the inverse of PAL-60).

Unlike analog formats, which has special color encoding, digital is just YUV data and frames per second. The NTSC video is output in one of several ways:
- 29.97 decimates to 25
- 29.97 converted (ghosted) to 25
- output as 29.97 and just let the TV handle it (and it does the same thing)

It's the same for viewing PAL in NTSC-land. Most players support both NTSC and PAL, since they're all cheaply made in China with universal kits. Only the earlier DVD players and Blu-ray players tend to be NTSC-only or PAL-only.

Since the source tapes are NTSC, it's best to leave it as NTSC. And then let the digital player sort out the while NTSC vs. PAL ordeal.

The resize/deinterlace suggestion is horrible. Never do that to your source, only a copy. Better yet, avoid it when possible. Deinterlacing is mostly for uploading to Youtube/etc, special restoration needs, etc -- not making discs. Leave discs interlaced.

Deinterlacing throws away 50% of the image data, and you cannot get it back.

Thanks guys, left it as NTSC and they've come out great. :)