PAL NTSC miniDV import issues

Question

PAL NTSC miniDV import issues

Hi:

I have several miniDV tapes that were taped in NTSC on a (US market) Canon camcorder between 2003 and 2006. Then, the camcorder broke and was replaced by a (German market) Sony camcorder, and of course I've continued to tape miniDV in PAL. Now we're back in the US, the camcorder plays both NTSC and PAL tapes but - as someone suggested in a forum - iMovie might require a match between camcorder and tape, i.e. import a PAL tape from a PAL camcorder, or an NTSC tape from an NTSC camcorder (and you can change the iMovie settings to match that).

And indeed, when trying to import the NTSC tapes with this camcorder, the import function tries to import, shows a blue screen for a few seconds, and stops. FYI, iMovie did import PAL tapes from this PAL camcorder without problems.

- Has anyone been able to import NTSC tapes into iMovie 09 using a PAL camcorder (that plays both PAL and NTSC tapes)?
- Is there a software workaround to get the footage onto the Mac through some other (free) software and then import the files from there into iMovie 09?
- Would be thankful for any other suggestions...

Thanks so much!

CL

Message was edited by: CL

Macbook Pro 15", iBook G4, iMac G4, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jun 20, 2009 12:01 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 20, 2009 8:47 AM in response to Christian Lambacher

Hi

Tried this. Didn't work.

I got a SONY TRV-900E (Recording PAL - Playback PAL and NTSC)

Playback NTSC - ONLY works on analog out to a TV

STRANGELY enough when connecting an A/D box like Canopus ADVC-300 to convert
the analog signal to streamingDV

THIS DOESN'T Work either.

So my NTSC tapes can only be viewed but can't be imported into the Mac any way.

ONLY solution I could figure out is to buy a cheap miniDV tape NTSC Camera and
use this to do the import.

THEN convert to either PAL or NTSC so the project keeps consistent.

I use JES Deinterlacer3.2.2 to do this with as good result as I could wish for
from a free application. The pro solution cost is astronomical.

Yours Bengt W

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Answer 2

Jun 22, 2009 10:29 AM in response to Christian Lambacher

perhaps this will work.
My initial problem was the other way around: PAL miniDV tape, played back on an NTSC camcorder.
Interestingly, the display on the camcorder showed the movie OK, but importing to iMovie did not seem to work.
This is how I got it to work:

Since the source is PAL, the destination project in iMOVIE was also set to Pal (ie frame reate of 25 fps).
The "new project" created properly displays the format as PAL. but as soon as the camera was switched on, the Mac recognises some chip in the camcorder, the project switches NTSC and can thefore no longer import the Clip. Sounds familiar?
Now: you unplug the firewire cable from the camcorder, recreate a "new project" in PAL, and the start video playback on the camcorder, put the iMOVIE switch to control camcorder and THEN insert the firewire cable, bingo, iMovie is somehow tricked and the import of the clip works fine, in PAL, no more error messages, and no "parse" / "parsing" problems.

Since you started out with tapes in NTSC, the same principle as above should hopefully work,

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