Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

I have a bunch of old VHS tapes in PAL format around, from when my brother and I made home movies in our early teens, about 12-16 years ago. I live in the States now, and wanted to back up the VHS movies onto DVD for safekeeping, as 11-15 year old VHS tapes are a far cry from a reliable archiving media.

I am using an ATI ViVo card with custom drivers (to bypass Macrovision which kicked in for some reason) to capture the PAL video directly to MPEG-2 with 2:3 Pulldown. The results are great. The a/v is in sync and everything. I am then using Studio 9 to add titles, and eventually add menus and compile the DVD.

My problem now is, that there are relatives, including my brother whom I made the home movies with, back home in Europe, who would also like to have copies of these movies. I decided to encode these in NTSC to begin with because I don't have a PAL DVD player here, nor a PAL TV, nor do I plan on ever moving back to Europe.

Going through 15 hours of VHS tapes to capture, edit and author everything again for PAL format is a task I would rather not undertake. Not to mention that I would not be able to test the resulting DVD since I have no PAL DVD player.

So my question is this: Is it in any way possible to open an existing Studio 9 NTSC project file, with all its mpeg2 files, menus, still images etc, and have Studio 9 convert it all into a PAL project? I assume not, but man do I wish it were.

If you know of another easy way to recompile an entire NTSC DVD in PAL, I am interested.

Region-free is one approach I'd rather not touch, as I've no way of knowing whether the standalone players in Europe would be able to play them back. I know my own DVD player doesn't do well with region-free DVDs.