NTSC video tape

Doubt it will make any difference. To get a recordable colour signal you need a genuine standards converter.

You should be able to record it to digital and then put that back onto tape. There is a lot of software that will convert the digital and a lot of digitizers that do NTSC and PAL. Its expensive though as the digitizers cost about £10.

I'm pretty sure that a few years ago, I managed to convert some 'normal' off-air hard disk PAL recordings to NTSC, using Nero (Version 6, which came free with a DVD read/write drive).

I don't need it back on tape ... I just need a digital file .... DV-AVI by choice or a good MPEG2

...except it's not NTSC or PAL coming out of the video recorder

For a bare chip

Where did we get to on this?

Using my fairly recently acquired Video-2-PC USB 'grabber'

With the Arcsoft software provided, you have to select what the format of the input video is. In this case, as the tapes were being played back on a UK VCR, 'NTSC-4.43'. [There are other options, such as tweaking the incoming colour, contrast and sharpness of the video (although, as you can't see what the effects are until after you've captured the video, it is essentially trial and error.]

Once you've captured the video, you can edit it (deleting various bits), and then you can produce an MPEG-2 file, and/or burn it (as either 'standard' 720x576 50Hz PAL or 720x480 29.97Hz NTSC) it to a DVD.

As I have a (very cheap) disk player which can output either PAL, naive NTSC or NTSC-4.43, and a TV which allows you to select AUTO, PAL, NTSC or NTSC-4.43, I've checked that the NTSC DVD that I produced is real NTSC (and not some weird mixture).

On a computer, the quality of the resulting mpg video files look pretty good. On a TV set, quality of the DVD is, well, reasonable (in either the original NTSC or when converted to PAL). Maybe some of the fast-moving things are a bit jerky, but in general, the disk is fairly watchable (no worse than when copying ordinary PAL video tapes).