[dood]

A generous donation of a series of medical teaching VHS tapes has been made to me for use by the Radiology Association of which I am the chairperson, and for use by postgraduate medical students at our University. The tapes are from the USA and are NTSC. For easy local use whereby the the teaching files can be viewed from laptop to LCD projector, they should ideally be copied onto DVD.

I tried to do this using a multisystem VCR set to output NTLC to Pal, and recording onto my Toshiba DVD recorder. Whilst copying to hard drive, the image was viewable on TV, but when viewing the copy later it flashed rapidly. I've been told that the problem is to do with NTSC as there is no macrovision copy protection on the tapes.

I now want to try the PC route and need to get a capture card. Can anyone advise on what hardware and software I need - nothing fancy. My PC is fairly high spec - P4 2.8, 400 gig, I gig RAM, Firewire, multiformat DVD writer.

[MarkE19]

Assuming that the VCR will play the NTSC tapes ok (it should do as you state it is a multistandards VCR) then I suggest you just get a Canopus ADVC conveter. This has analogue inputs for the VCR and connects to the PC via firewire. Then you just use any editing package to capture from the VCR. The PC just sees the ADVC as a firewire device and as long as the software does not have device control enabled you should find it easy to capture.
The captured footage will still be NTSC (ie don't try to get the VCR to convert the output to PAL) and therefore the DVD will be NTSC. This should not be a problem as AFAIK all DVD players will play and output NTSC without a problem. Just make sure the PJ can display NTSC video. If you need to convert to PAL then get Adobe Premiere Elements or Canopus Procoder as this software will likely do a better job than the VCR.

Rather than get the Canopus ADVC, if your camcorder has AV-in enabled then you can use that to convert the analogue video to digital and pass through to the PC.

Mark.

[MarkE19]

Having just reread your post:

have you tried outputting NTSC from the VCR to your DVD recorder. Some recorders will work with an NTSC signal ok and this will save the time & effort reuired to copy the tapes via a PC. As I stated above, the chances are that the VCR does not do a good job of converting NTSC to PAL and this could be what the problem was.

Mark.

[dood]

I have the same problem whether the VCR is set to NTSC or NTSC to Pal.

I didn't think of the camcorder option. I have the Sony HC 30E which AFAIK allows for analogue in. The only problem is I think the camcorder is PAL, will this pass through an NTSC signal?

Now the software. I don't have any dedicated video editing software. I have used windows movie maker a long time ago so I guess I could try this as I won't really be doing any editing, just top and tailing and inserting chapter breaks. I don't want to splash out huge amounts on something like adobe premier. For about 50 pounds or so, what would the best easy to use software be? Years ago when I was looking at this, I recall considering Ulead and Pinnacle products, but I'm sure a lot has changed since then.

Premiere Elements will do all you need for £70 (there was a promo on for £50), no point buying anything else at this price point, prem elelments is the mutss nutts for the money