A friend of mine somehow shot some material with an ntsc camera, or so it says on my DCR-HC17E PAL. I tried playing it on my canon but then I get nothing. So it will play on the sony camera, although it is a strange sort of black and white(hardly any color in it)
I want to help her put the recording back to pal. Can fcp convert it to pal? The quality is not really very important, she would be glad if it can just be salvaged.
But I have some technical questions
1) it does play on my pal camera but the log and capture window does not show any video...I have tried ntsc settings and pal settings.
2) does that mean I will have to find a proper ntsc camera?
3) even if I do can I somehow output the material to pal? and do I need to capture in NTSC(seems logic)

thanks...

It's a PAL only Camera so it won't play NTSC tapes back properly as you found out. Try renting/borrow a DSR 11 deck which can play out NTSC, or a new Sony Z1 camera which you can switch as well.

If you wanna do a good conversion in FCP, go buy Nattress' plugins: www.nattress.com . It has a conversion tool which works very good. So you've to capture in NTSC, and via the plugin you can use the material in a PAL timeline.

Groeten uit Rotterdam!

Just noticed there's also an article in the current (March) issue of MacWorld magazine about converting formats using Compressor 2 on the Mac. I gather this is slower than Graeme's standards conversions, but it is included with FCP 5.

But Vincent is correct, you'll need an NTSC camera to capture the footage. Or you could use a Sony HVR-Z1 which is switchable between PAL and NTSC.

compressor2 does pretty good frame interpolation, as far as i can tell. it apparently uses the engine from shake to do this. i haven't converted between international standards, but i've used it to make 60i material slo-mo, and it looks pretty good. there's an article about doing this in compressor here:
http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=33819

it is SSSLLOOWW, though, so be warned.