Ok, here's waht I've done so far. I have a Canopus ADVC-100. I've taken the tape video and captured it to my computer. I then took the file and told VEGAS to render it as PAL MPEG. Is this correct? I'm asking because although the video was only 15 minutes, it's taking almost 1.5 hours to render.

If I rendered it to NTSC, it would only take a little over 15 minutes. Why the difference? Am I missing something? Is there some additional step required?

Help please.

It should take MUCH longer to render, lots of conversions goign on. No additional steo should be required.
One thing to watch for though is the de-interlace option in the project settings. Render a small section of the NTSC vid to dv and see which setting gives you the best results. Use the same one when encoding to mpeg-2. You can view the resulting DV from the Vegas TL.
I've only gone the other way around but seems to work very well.

My goodness! So I really don't have to make a PAL DVD? That would make things easier. But why then does VEGAS have that option?

Additionally, I notice that under the capture portion of VEGAS under "options/preferences/capture" there is a setting of "Analog device options". The choices are: NTSC, PAL as well as others. The ? (HELP) feature says: "Select the frame rate in which video will be captured."

Since I'm using the ADVC-100 and the source is "analog", do I choose PAL here? In MY mind I'm figuring that my Canopus device is changing the video from analog to digital. Therefore, what VEGAS is seeing is completely digital. Am I right on this?

As a side point, I noticed that the file I rendered to PAL did NOT turn out well. The result is nowhere near as clear as the original capture.

There are PAL DVD players. I had do make a PAL DVD for Austrailia for the Brisbane International Film Festival.

In doing this, all I had to do was render in Vegas as PAL. Then I defined the DVD project as PAL and everything was fine. I used DVD Workshop for the DVD and it is important to make the project as PAL because if not, the people with PAL probably won't be able to watch it.

I didn't have a PAL DVD player, so I did a few things to be sure it was OK. I was going to send the ISO disk image to them through an FTP site so things were a little unusual.

The DVD really was PAL. I used a DVD check progeram just to be sure. Then I poped it into my reguklar DVD player and it hated it (so I knew it wasn't NTSC). For fun, I tried it in my older Pioneer DVD/Laser/CD player. It was connected to a 42" Sony Plasma. Lo and behold! The screen displayed "PAL" as it automatically switched from NTSC to PAL. and that also meant the player really did play a PAL DVD!

So it is easy to make a true PAL DVD. I suggest you first render as PA in vegasL. Since I use DVD Workshop and know it needs to be told it is a PAL project, I don't know what you tell DVD-A but I can be certain you really need to tell it is a PAL project so it doesn't convert everything back to NTSC. Iit might be possible to just do a PAL project and then DVD-A would convert the NTSC videos tyo PAL. (I think DVD Workshop-2 will do that automatically, as I have fed an assortment of videos into it that were MOV or WMV and it did convery and re-render them as NTSC.)

Rendering to PAL will loook as good. Use PAL-DV settings. I'd capture as NTSC, as that is what your tape really is. Let Vegas render it as PAL-DV in MPEG-2.

I think if you try to capture it as PAL you won't get good results. There isn't time for the processor to interpolate frames. When you render the NTSC to PAL, it can take all the time it needs to do a great job.

If they in the UK have digital equipment that accepts anything (like my Sony plasma TV and Pioneer player) then it won't really make any difference.But if anyone will need to watch it on normal TVs, or want to copy it to tape for friends, then it will have to be a true PAL DVD. Normal analog PAL equipment won't show NTSC, just as normal NTSC equipment in the US won't show PAL.

Hope this helps.