I live in Israel and have a Sony PAL mini DV camera (DCR-TRV22E). I
use it to capture video from my Playstation2 console, using a RCA
connection. I can only capture video from PAL games this way, but not
from NTSC games. If I try connecting my mini DV to my Playstation 2
console while it is running a NTSC game, all I get is a blue screen on
my mini DV (as it does whenever I connect anything with a NTSC signal
to it). I also can't capture videos from my Xbox and GameCube
consoles, since they are both NTSC systems. Is there any sort of
device/cable/booster that I can use to capture NTSC video using my PAL
mini DV? Where can I find it? I prefer something that I can find at
any local electronics shop or can order online from a store that ships
to Israel.

Hello there Iotanam,

The device you seek is called a "standards converter."  Professionl
versions can cost many thousands of dollars.  But there are comsumer
ones that might be in your price range, albeit with compromised
quality.  Here's one such, at $USD 179:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=details&Q=&is=REG&O=productlist&sku=244774

...but at that price you will see some nasty conversion artifacts in
your PAL output from this gizmo for sure.

The basic issue is that PAL samples an image 50 times per second (two
fields per frame, the framerate being 25 frames per second; whereas
NTSC samples the image at 59.94 fields per second (i.e., 29.97 frames
per second).  Motion in your image that PAL captures into its signal
information occurs at times (and thus at different places in the
image, for moving objects) different than for NTSC.  The job of a
standards converter is to perform the trick of guessing what the NTSC
image might have looked like during the times the PAL signal was
capturing some other part of the image.  This is hard to do well, for
many reasons, and good convertors are very expensive for that reason.

If you are taping these signals to ultimately capture them into a
computer, say as an AVI or MPEG stream, you might preserve better
quality by useing an NTSC video capture card (or a multistandard one
NTSC/PAL) in your PC, vs. taping and converting the signal.

Also, don't forget that if your devices offer S-video in/out, that
signal format is cleaner than either NTSC or PAL, and is better for PC
capture too.

As an aside, you may know that PAL is short for "Phase Alternate
Line," referring to a trick and improvement (over NTSC) in how the
color is encoded.  It eliminated the need for a "Hue" knob on PAL TV
sets.  NTSC officially refers to the "National Television Standards
Committee" that was formed to figure out how to shoehorn color
information into the then-existing black-and-white-only TV system in
the USA (in the '50s).  But professionals joke that because NTSC's
spec. demanded a hue knob, it really means "Never Twice Same Color." 
Around that time, the rooskies (always needing to do their own thing)
invented a competing color encoding system called "NIR"; the joke was
that this stood for "Not Intentionally Red."  PAL came along later,
thus is refered to as "Peace At Last."