Capturing NTSC in Europe?

[Niles]

I'm living in Europe but often buy VHS NTSC movies from America.
I have also a PixelView TV-card and I would like to capture the NTSC movies with it but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working. The image becomes 3/4 split..I'm not sure how to explain it.
Does anyone know if it's possible to correct this automatically. As it is now, I have to cap it that way and then "drag out" the image so it covers the full screen so to spek.
Also, I can't capture at any size bigger than 384x288 because then the image becomes totally wacko..Why is that?

Niles

[yohudi]

NTSC probs

Think the reason you experience capture probs with NTSC is probably down to the fact that the NTSC standard uses a different number of scanlines than PAL (or SECAM). i.e. 500 lines in NTSC as opposed to 625 in PAL (not sure about SECAM to tell the truth).

Sounds like your cap card is either trying to grab 625 lines, of which only 500 are actually used within the NTSC frame. This would leave you with about 25% blank space in the frame as you describe.

I used to produce dubs of NTSC to PAL using a couple of SVHS machines. The PAL dub would always have about 25% of the frame either missing or appearing corrupt. The only workaround I found for this was to use a borrowed Panasonic "Worldwide" VHS machine as the player. This seemed to perform the standards conversion OK but was v expensive machine to buy so I don't think this will help you much.

You should be able to use a prog like adobe premiere to automate your resizing as a batch job. This would allow you to crop out the corrupt part of the frame and resize on the first frame only then save the operations in the batch job. After which you simply use the batch processing function to do the entire file for you. Might take some time tho, and the aspect ratio of the frame would not match the original.

[Lee]

I have related troubles, My capture card is a Hauppage WinTV Go card and you can select the input format from your VCR, but when you select the NTSC one for US videos you get a reasonable picture but lose most of the colour! Anyone know how to fix this, and whats the best Videocapture application software for this card?

Ta!

Lee

[Baltazar]

I have borrowed a VCR (Philips VR910) which is able to playback NTSC VHS in PAL 60Hz format. If you managed to capture your NTSC to your computer (I am also only receiving B/W picture from the VCR), please contact me, thanks.