NTSC to PAL with Vegas 4 help needed.

[Neishaverse]

I recorded something off digital cable, and need to make a DVD copy for a friend in Europe.

It's a 90 minute NTSC AVI 720x480 DV capture.
Encoding:
MPEG-2 VBR Max 9.0 Avg 6.3 Min 2.0

I encoded to MPEG-2 NTSC for myself. Only took 2 hours to encode.
I tried to encode it again with all the same bitrates, but in PAL.
It's looking like it's gonna be almost 20 hours before it will be done.
Is this normal when changing between NTSC and PAL?
And will the quality in the PAL version be as good as my NTSC version?
I don't wanna waste 20 hours making a file that's not gonna look good when I send him the DVD.

Thanks for any advice, and comments!
Barney

[dunamis]

Hi Barney:
I've been using the same software and sending my NTSC DVDs to my family in Britain. Their DVD players appear to be able to play these with no problems at all - despite the DVDs not being in PAL format. I even sent some NTSC VCDs and they also worked well in their players. It would be worth sending a sample disk over to let them try it. I've been told that most European DVD players have the ability to decode NTSC videos perfectly well. I hope this is helpful to you.

[Neishaverse]

That is good to know, but is it normal for Vegas to take almost a full day to convert NTSC to PAL? I have a very fast system and didn't think it was that big of a deal to convert video.

Barney

[dunamis]

That does sound rather a long time. I've never done that conversion as it has not proved to be necessary since my family can view our NTSC DVDs just fine, so I don't really know for sure. I have a Pentium 4 2.4MHz and usually let it process while I sleep. Quality with Vegas has been superb. I've also got Premiere and like its editing capabilities but it's buggy and crashes too often. Vegas has never crashed on me.

[Neishaverse]

I'm in the last 2 (Of 20 hours) I just hope when this has finished, the audio and video synch up. I have never had a problem with Vegas. Usually it keeps the synch even if you mix sources.

I just thought it would be faster then 20 hours to convert a 90 minute movie.

Barney