From: David Tetzlaff (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Mar 06 2009 - 12:42:57 PST
> Some of the Mini DV's are in PAL and some are NTSC... do I need to
> convert the PAL to NTSC and if so, how do I do this?
That depends. Doing a PAL to NTSC conversion would be the most
difficult part of your process, and generally results in a noticeable
loss of quality. If the screening will be projected, most video
projectors will accept either NTSC or PAL signals. (Of course, you'll
have to check). The next question: is the mini-DV device that will be
used for playback dual system (many Sony models are, e.g. dsr-11,
dsr-25...)? If so, you're best bet is to put all the PAL pieces
together on one tape (in PAL) and all the NTSC pieces on another tape
and have one reel change.
> Also, is it possible to take films from DVD and put them onto Mini DV,
yes
> and if so, does this greatly diminish the quality?
No. a DVD is somewhat lower quality than DV (how much depends on how
it was encoded), but it's not going to get visibly worse in
transferring to DV. You can do this either by making an analog dub
from the DVD plater to a DV deck via the s-video jack, or you can do
it digitally via a computer. The most widely used software for this
is MPEG Streamclip - http://www.squared5.com/ - which is free. Of
course, you would need some sort of non-linear editing program to get
the DV file generated by Streamclip back onto DV tape.
If you DO have to convert PAL to NTSC, you'll need some fairly
powerful software. There are a number of low-cost or freeware
programs that do rough format conversions, but the results are
wretched. In a Mac environment, either Compressor or the Nattress
plug-in for FCP will do a decent job. I don't know about Windows.
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