i had the same sort of problem some time ago, in truth i am not that great at all this stuff but what i found out is that i had to get hold of the sme make of camera that the film was taken on to get any good capture to be able to edit from, i had started to do use my sony cam but the capture was very poor. after a few days of asking around i got my hands on a cannon camera. did this using the firewire.
I have always had problem converting NTSC to Pal but i did get my hands on Blaze Media Pro software and it worked.
heres the link for you.
Convert PAL <-> NTSC, NTSC <-> PAL Converter Video / MPEG Software