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Freshcut DVD provides a professional service including convert NTSC to PAL. We specilise in all major consumer tape formats!

Freshcut DVD is the authority when it comes to Video transfer to DVD. We use state-of-the-art equipment to make sure the job is done to the highest technical specification resulting in the best quality DVD that can be created from the original tape source. Freshcut DVD is based in London, UK but services anyone in Europe.

Digital re-mastering and transfering of your VHS Tape to DVD
Audio level balancing and enhancement
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Audio converted to Dolby Stereo

The resulting video streams are authored and burned to DVD. We can get as much as four hours on a single DVD transfer with most customers remarking that the resulting video is clearer, sharper and sounds better!

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Trust Freshcut DVD to preserve your memories and make sure you know what you are buying! There are many tape to dvd conversion companies who simply plug your precious memories into low quality DVD recorders and send you the result. This is the inferior way to preserve your memories as no digital corrections can be made to the video or the audio. For more information see the benefits of using Freshcut DVD to convert NTSC to PAL.

At some point in time you will need to convert NTSC to PAL so why wait for your tapes to degrade further. Call Freshcut today!

Converting between NTSC and PAL video by Andrew Alexander Published on February 13, 2004

Television systems across the world are different. The two most popular formats are NTSC, used in North America and beyond (National Television System Committee) and PAL, used in Europe (Phase Alternating Line). Since you record a signal on a camcorder that ultimately is supposed to be watched on a television, camcorder manufacturers make different models of the same basic unit to support these different television formats. Not surprisingly, video shot on one system won't work on another system. This doesn't help when you want to show video of the kids to your family overseas. (For more information on video standards, check out the National Center for Supercomputing Applications World Wide Television Guide.)

There are ways around this problem. Before I get to that however, I want to discuss a bit about how the formats are different, and the same.

As far as camcorders are concerned, NTSC video is characterized by a frame size of 720x480, and produces images at a rate of around 30 frames per second. PAL video is slightly different in that there is a bit more image quality - the frame size is 720x576 - but it only produces 25 frames per second.

When a miniDV camcorder sends data out from its DV port (known similarly as firewire, i.Link and IEEE1394), it doesn't matter what format the video was shot in. As far as the computer is concerned, it's just a bunch of ones and zeroes. In fact, if you do some basic math, you see that NTSC and PAL have a common bandwidth that makes data transmission work:

NTSC: 720 x 480 x 30 = 10,368,000 PAL: 720 x 576 x 25 = 10,368,000

So, regardless of whether it's NTSC or PAL data, the computer knows what to expect. And when you capture it to the computer, most editing programs will be able to work with the video regardless of the format. However, that's where the fun begins.

Convert NTSC to PAL: the quick and dirty way Editing programs allow you to change the frame size easily enough, and there are also options for changing the frame rate. The frame size is easy, but the way most programs change the frame rate is to just add or remove a proportionate number of frames to make up the difference. For example, to change from 30 frames per second to 25 frames per second, you have to remove 5 frames every second. The simple way of doing this is to just take out every sixth frame (30/5=6). But what this actually ends up doing is giving your video a 'skip' every sixth of a second (which in practice, is pretty disorienting). If you can live with that, then converting from NTSC to PAL is as simple as that. Of course you also have to expand your frame size from 480 pixels to 576 pixels of height, either by adding 96 pixels of blank space or stretching your image by 20% vertically. Either way, you're going to have to recompress each frame of your video, so you may be letting it run overnight.

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