Making a PAL VHS
 

Just finished shooting a project, and the guest of honor / hostess asked me about providing their party on both VHS (NTSC) and VHS(PAL) format, so they can take a tape back to their friends in England. Seems like they don't want to buy a DVD player, since they will be dead in another 40-50 years anyway. I could do a PAL DVD with Vegas. Anyway, I assume I need a PAL VHS recorder to do this, and I am wondering if anyone wants to do a conversion for me? I tried local, but no has ability to do this.

I will send you a DV or VHS-NTSC tape. Contact me at PAL @stone-age dot com. Let me know how much you want to charge me. I only need one copy, AFAIK.

There are a lot of shops that will do NTSC<-->PAL conversions. They might record to VHS (PAL) too. Generally, the quality of the conversion is what you pay for. A good quality conversion will cost you more (like a few hundred). For home videos and things like that, there are some places that will do cheap NTSC/PAL conversions (i.e. some camera/photo shops).

It might be easier for you to do the conversion yourself, make a PAL DVD, and tell them to buy a DVD player (they don't cost that much nowadays?). If you have Final Cut Pro, check out Nattress' standards converter. His plug-ins have great support, and you get free upgrades for the new and improved versions, and you can tryout demo filters for free beforehand to make sure they work (they are watermarked and say DEMO).

Or they can get their PAL DVD transferred to VHS. And then they might even be able to watch your NTSC DVDs.

I tried suggesting they get a DVD player twice and that didn't fly. But I should try that again. If I make them a PAL DVD, is there a software player for my XP machine I can get that would be able to verify it will work before I send them to Great Britain with it? If you don't know of one off-hand, I can do a Google search but would not know anything beyond that (good vs bad).

John. Dunno if it's worth your while, but so long as the footage isn't of anything like a hunting/fishing party/event I'd be more than happy to take your footage and write you a PAL VHS of it. I'm in New Zealand though so it'd probably take 2-3 weeks round trip.

If you're able to render me a PAL mpg2 that's even easier - I can just load it up into Vegas and print it out to VHS and at the same time knock you off a DVD version.

Aaron

PS:No charge.

Hey, thanks aaron. I finally found a company reasonably closer than New Zealand that can do it for about $60. But I appreciate the offer. So now I go back to client and say, do you want a single PAL tape, or do you want a DVD player that you can own forever?

I cant remember exactly but Samsung has a VCR that can convert from NTSC to PAL to SECAM. or any other configuration you can make. It will also play back any format. Its been a while since ive used VHS though, so i dont know where to find it. hehe.