Video links ( alternative film )

NTSC VHS tapes are not compatible with PAL VHS machines. Some PAL VHS machines will have NTSC playback and are usually marked as such on the front panel or possibly in the user manual. If you try to play an NTSC tape on a PAL VHS machine and it is not compatible you will hear the sound but it will sound fast and you may see some hints of picture but it will certainly be unwatchable. An NTSC playback PAL VHS machine is able to run the tape at the right speed (example, an E180 tape recorded in NTSC mode will only contain 126 mins hense T120 tapes are common in the US and about the longest tape you can buy easily over there is the T160 which is roughly equivalent to an E240 in length of the tape albeit with the different running time).

If your VHS machine can play NTSC tapes it will also convert the NTSC colour signal to PAL. What you actually end up with is PAL 525/60 which is very similar to PAL-M used in Brazil. This is a 525 line 60Hz picture with PAL colour. You will not be able to record this signal onto another PAL VHS machine as the line structure is still the same as NTSC 525/60 with only the colour changed. PAL-I as we use is PAL 625/50 and any recording you try to make will "beat" as the 50 fields recording is made from a 60 fields input. A modern PAL TV should be able to understand the 525/60 signal and display it correctly though, and as it has a PAL decoder it will produce a colour picture. Some NTSC replay equipment can also put out a true NTSC 525/60 signal and if your TV understands that you will get a slightly better picture, but frankly this is VHS we are talking about so it won't really matter that much. A LaserDisc/DVD player can put out PAL 60 as well as true NTSC and because all my TVs are NTSC capable I drive them with pure NTSC.

If you want to copy an NTSC VHS tape to PAL you need a couple of things. Probably a macrovision buster if the tape is copy protected, and also a digital tandards converter capable of taking an NTSC 525/60 signal and converting the colour to PAL and the video to 625/50 and then you will be able to record it onto a PAL VHS tape. The picture will look a bit grotty unless you spend big money on the converter, mine is pretty cheap but does an acceptable job. Also, some standards converters don't understand PAL 525/60 as put out by NTSC replay VHS machines.

While NTSC is often refered to as Never The Same Colour (PAL doesn't stand for People Are Lavender no matter what some wags on the other side of the pond might think) it can actually look pretty decent. It's just that the vast majority of NTSC TVs you might see on your travels are set up poorly giving orange faces and the likes. In reality, a properly calibrated NTSC display can look every bit as good as PAL.

Of course, we can no longer claim our TV picture is better than the Americans as they now have HDTV and that looks pretty good it has to be said. They also now have DVHS machines that can record the data from a satellite and later drive an HD decoder. Even though we have switched a lot of viewers over to digital TV now it is still at 625/50 interlaced video. In the US they have 480i/480p/720p/1080i digital TV formats (p=progressive scan, i=interlaced). Region 1 DVDs are 480p, region 2 DVDs are 580p, digital TV over here is 580i.
These numbers are the number of scanlines used to build up the picture. On 525 line NTSC only 480 lines contain video, the rest are off screen and may contain other data like closed captioning. Over here our 625 lines only display 580 lines and the rest are also off screen and teletext for instance. For digital TV they only bothered to encode the visible so they get 480i and we get 580i. The most common HD format in use in the US is 720p which is somewhat higher resolution than the best region 2 DVDs can do but it isn't really HD. Only the 1080i format really counts as true HD and it does look amazing. Such a shame we didn't get the 1250i HD they promised us back in the mid 90's over here. Oh well, maybe one day. Progressive scan video looks better than Interlace on a good monitor as it has about 30% more apparent resolution. This is one of the reasons that deinterlacers are nice to have as it makes the picture look a little sharper. My DLP projector has a deinterlacer, interpolator and video scaler built in and it is amazing what it can do to take a boring old 480i NTSC laserdisc up to a 100" picture and still look clear and very film like.

taken from email by Shane

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