Video help please
 

I got a video my friend that lives in england took while she was here. She mailed me a DV tape but when i play it it looks all scrambled. I'm thinking mabye they have a different format over there. How can i transfer it to the correct format?

you probably will need a player that plays PAL
you are probably playing on a NTSC player

If you look in the Yellow Pages you may find a local service (assuming you're in a reasonably large city) that can copy it to NTSC for you, if that indeed is what your problem is. Look under video categories: video labs, video recording, video copying, stuff like that.

thanks, is there a way to transfer it to the computer and convert it or anything like that?

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You can get the same scrambled look if the heads on your player are dirty. Could be a much simpler fix but it is so obvious that I doubt you would have overlooked that possibility.

You sure it was a DV (digial video) tape?

Or was it a VHS?

If it is DV what type of DV?

Mini DV
DVCAM
DigiBeta
ect ect ect

yeah i know its not dirty because i played it on the camera and it was scrambled, then i played a different tape and it worked fine. its a mini dv tape and my camera is a dv camera.

you have to bring it to a store where they can convert it yes, pal has more lines then ntsc so when you play pal on a ntsc vidcam it looks like its scrambled and stretched, most of the time b/w with green lines. There are ways to set a DV cam to pal or ntsc, but its risky, try to lookup if the cams ntsc or pal at the company site eg www.sony.com

also : some pal cams and vcr's have ntsc playback dont know if thats vice versa as well, maybe it is...

1st of all you need to know proper format of this tape and your equipment. If there are different formats you got a problem.

We have a long time experience with PAL/NTSC troubles. Cause we shoot on Sony VX-2000 NTSC miniDV camcorder and some of our European customers can?t view it properly and/or capture.

(1) You can?t view NTSC tapes on PAL equipment (or reversal mode);

(2) You can?t capture NTSC reordered video into your PC if you play the tape on PAL equipment (or reversal mode);

(3) You can?t get pal signal if you simply dub tapes by using different types of consumer electronics;

(4) No one miniDV consumer recorder records in different formats;

(5) You can just transcode video signal. For this purpose you need Pal/NTSC transcoder. You can rent it on your local TV station (like we do). This is professional broadcasting equipment and it costs several thousands of dollars and a nearest consumer electronics shop don?t sell it (no online merchants too) :(

If anybody knows better and/or cheaper way I will donate some content him :2 cents: