Video help

[Myrrdin]

Can anyone tell me , are the full size tapes from American video cameras, compatible with UK Video Cassette Recorders? I remember a thread from the past about this subject, but have had no luck searching for it. (Seem to remember Weird Harold talking about the PAL system.)

If they are incompatible, do I have any other option apart from purchasing a US compatible video cassette player and having the tapes snail-mailed? (ie. computer to computer e-mail files for example?)

 

[Fly_On_Wall]

I know a girl from England and was going to send her cartoons that she couldn't watch out there...

Canadian tapes won't work in European machines.


as for tha PAL thing that is a colour system that the european tv's use, american ones use i believe it's called NSTF i think, computer monitors use RGB and printers CMYK ( i know that won't help you with the video but if you ever need to know in the future there you have it lol)

 

[Mr_Neb]

I am positive that pre-recorded tapes from the US will not work in Europe and vice versa. Europe used the PAL systems of video that among the other differences, has 625 lines of video at a frequency of 50Hz. The U.S. system is called NTFC and has 525 lines at 60 Hz.

I do not know about blank tapes though. The actual tape shouldn't matter but the cassettes may be designed differently.

Hope this helps.

 

[Weird Harold]

I do not know about blank tapes though. The actual tape shouldn't matter but the cassettes may be designed differently.

The US/Canadian standard is NTSC (National Television Standards Commision I think.) Other wise You got the details exactly right.

The physical VHS cartidges are the same for either standard, it is the information recorded on them that differs. (Playing PAL tapes in a NTSC machine results in scrambled B&W image and garbled sound.)

In theory, a two hour VHS tape could be digitized into MPeG or MOV (QuickTime format) and attached to an e-mail. In practice, there is just no way to compress that size file down to the five MB single file limit for most e-mail servers.

Such a file could be encoded with UUEncode and broken up over about fifty dozen e-mails but the potential for corruption in that process is such that you'd basically be wasting time and bandwidth.

The best bet would be to use DVD's or CD-RW disks in MPeG format to exchange movies between the US and Europe.

 

[Myrrdin]

Thanks everyone for your help.
The CD rewrite discs idea sounds promising. They would certainly save on postage.

 

[Fly_On_Wall]

NTSC that's it. I can never remeber that one right, lol and it's the one i use

 

[JUDO]

Where?

Myrrdin -

First off, where are you? USA? UK? ??

Depending on where you are, the reccomendations get easier.

From your brief post, it sounds like you have an american Video camera and you wish to view it on a (possible) UK television and VHS system. No?

If this is the case, your problem is this: You have NTSC synchronized video on your VHS-sized camera (30 frames a second) and PAL synchronized video on your VHS-sized VCR system (can't recall 33 or 27 frames per second for PAL).

So, in spite of physical attributes of tapes being the same (yes, they will fit and not ruin the machines), they will not decode the magnetic data on the tape in the same way because the reader and writer are out-of-sync and that can't be fixed easily.

So,if you have what I assume you have and you are where I assume you are the easiest solution is one of three things:

1) Buy a new video camera with PAL sync on it
2) Buy an american VHS player with NTSC on it
3) Do what most of my Brit friends do here in america who can't live without their old episodes of "Faulty Towers". Buy a VHS player that plays both NTSC and PAL tapes. It's sort've a two-in-one deal like those new VHS/DVD players, but a solution none-the-less.

By the way, color spaces like CMYK have nothing to do with NTSC, PAL or the third system SECAM (used mostly in Southeast Asian countries).

Now, go forth and use the knowledge! hahahaha! Oh, and by the way, label which tapes have which encoding. Makes life easier.


- Judo