lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/04/84)
There are transfer houses around who will be happy to transfer between the North American NTSC and the other standards (PAL, PAL-M, SECAM ...) However, these services are NOT CHEAP. Most of the transfer houses are here in Los Angeles or in New York City. "Image Transform" is a well known one out here, though I occasionally get calls from places who can undercut I.T.'s price by quite a margin. Still expensive, though. These services will actually transfer between tape formats, an operation which requires high speed A/D and D/A operations, with lotsa fun bit twiddling in between. To simply VIEW an image from a "foreign" tape, you normally need BOTH a multi-standard VTR and a multi-standard monitor. The big manufacturers (including SONY, my personal choice for virtually all video gear) do sell such equipment in their professional product lines. Once again -- big bucks. When viewing non-NTSC images DIRECTLY on an NTSC set (e.g. off of a satellite feed) it is sometimes possible (via horizontal and vertical hold manipulations) to lock onto PAL or SECAM images. This is due to the fact that the scan rates are close enough to NTSC standards that some sets can be "misadjusted" to track. The resulting image has a damaged aspect ratio, however, since you are attempting to view under rather "rigorous" conditions, to say the least. You will NOT be able to receive color under any conditions -- the systems are totally different. Such techniques do not work with videotapes, where exact synchronization of the spinning heads to the signal is required for proper operation. --Lauren--