About 8mm Camcorder TapesĪt their core, 8mm camcorder tapes are simply tapes with an 8mm wide magnetic tape that is encased in a compact cassette.īut how did 8mm tapes become popular, and why do you need to preserve them? History of 8mm Videoįor a bit of background history, the 8mm video format first came around in 1984 when Eastman Kodak introduced the technology. The great news is, you can absolutely save the content on those 8mm camcorder tapes by converting them to digital. What’s more, the tapes won’t last forever. This makes watching the content stored on those tapes almost impossible.
Like so many media formats in a rapidly advancing world of technology, 8mm video has become nearly obsolete. And these tapes may contain priceless moments that you can’t watch unless you can somehow get your old camcorder to work and find the cord to hook up to the TV. We’ll convert your PAL format tape onto a standard DVD or USB that can be viewed on any computer, laptop or TV.If you taped any home videos in the ‘80s and ‘90s, then you likely have 8mm camcorder tapes stored somewhere. You also don’t have to worry about getting back a PAL DVD you can’t watch because your tape is PAL. We recommend both, because it’s always good to have a backup. That being said, PAL records at a slower speed than NTSC so if you have a tape capable of holding 120 minutes of footage, it will likely have a little bit more than that if it’s PAL. The best way to have an idea of the length of your tape is to base it off the format and the length it’s capable of recording, because tapes are universal (which we’ve mentioned before). At minimum, they are an hour of footage if you have a PAL MiniDV tape or a PAL VHS-c tape, but could go up to 2 hours of footage for other tapes like PAL VHS tapes or PAL 8mm tapes. Because the tapes were universal and it was about PAL encoding, there are PAL format tapes for everything: VHS, MiniDV, 8mm, Beta, etc. Nope! It’s possible any of your tapes are PAL if you ever lived or visited abroad with a video camera. In addition to looking identical, they also have the same amount of tape on the inside.Ĭommon PAL to digital questions Are PAL tapes only VHS? There are a lot of technical ways to explain the difference between a PAL tape and a NTSC tape, but we won’t get into that. This new encoding system became a thing in the 1950s when the standards of NTSC encoding were insufficient due to the potenial for poor transmission in Western European countries that created a lot of issues with color, so PAL was developed to work around that. Video tapes are universal, so even if yours are labeled with NTSC, if they were recorded on a PAL configured camera then they were encoded as PAL tapes. You’ll see that your tapes likely all say NTSC, the US system. PAL (Phase Alternating Lines) is a system of color encoding for analog video that was used almost everywhere BUT the United States. If you answered yes to one or both of these questions, then you might have some PAL tapes! The good news is that we can absolutely Convert PAL format tape to DVD, and the so-so news is that there is no good way to know which tapes are PAL if you don’t already.
You can visit our standard video transfer service page if you don’t have any PAL tapes. If you answered no to both of these questions, it’s very unlikely that any of the video tapes you have around are PAL format tapes. Have you or a member of your family ever lived abroad?ĭid you or your family ever travel outside the United States with your video camera on a family vacation?
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