Sony HVR Z5E that records in Pal, can it be converted to NTSC before I drop it onto the timeline in Vegas Pro?

That cam records to tape which cannot be loaded into Vegas.
How do you digitalize those tapes and when and what must be coverted?

I forgot to mention, I won't be recording to tape. I will only be using the compact flash memory recorder that attaches to the camcorder directly. It will record Mt2 files. So will the video be perfect, and will the audio be perfect also ?

Thanks for that info.
I don't know how it goes the simple way, the filetype is HDV with the Mt2 extension(so being mpeg2). Those files were recorded at 25 interlaced frames and you wil use them as?
What projecttype you want to use and what are your exportgoals?
Most can be done with Vegas but you can get troubles with some doubled half frames.
I did never convert those files to NTSC framerate because I live in a PAL country in Europe.
Maybe converting first the files in a videoconverter to NTSC framerate can help, you have to try it out yourself with a small project.

I would like to be able to render out to mainly Mpeg2 or Mp4 files. The rendered files would be 60i as I would be using slow motion on certain clips I record. And I would like to find out if the quality of both video & audio would be an issue.

thanks, robert

Vegas can handle all the conversion really well, however if you plan on first converting 50i to 60i, you are going to lose some quality in the process, might end up with some judder where frames don't evenly divide or other artifacts. Then if you plan on taking that and running it in slow mo, doing yet another frame rate conversion, you can expect to take a hit in temporal quality. There really isn't a way around this.

If it can, will it lose any quality whatsoever?

Yes. 29.970 is more than 25. The nonexistent frames must be faked by some means.