Thanks for your reply Bob, but I'm not sure that I was clear with my question....
I'm aware that I can render all of my clips to NTSC with Vegas, but I am interested to know if DVD Architect 2 or 3 will be able to produce an NTSC master, from my original PAL project, without having to re-render all of my original clips.

Essentially, there is about 4 days straight rendering if I was to redo all of the clips as this was a fairly big project, and I am trying to avoid tying my PC up for that length of time just for this one copy.

...and remember that Japanese NTSC doesn't use setup.

Your original PAL source doesn't use setup, but if you add an NTSC broadcast clamp it will look really really mushy on a Japanese TV set.

Here's my Pan-American Triple Challenge:

1. Catch the guy who invented the Canadian postal codes (2BS FU2). Talk about the path to that warm place being paved with good intentions...

2. Catch the guy who invented NTSC setup, which gives away a chunk of picture quality in return for saving $2.00 on the manufacturing cost of every vacuum tube TV sold. How many decades have we been suffering because of this?

3. Catch the guy who wrote the "Mi Corazon" song that's played on Mexican radio stations in the U.S. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Once would have been enough. (Don't get me wrong here, I love Mexican music as played live in Mexico, that's completely different.)

Lest somebody think I'm being parochial here, I'd like to suggest medals for the broadcast engineers at several Latino TV stations (and one Japanese/Korean ditto) in the L.A. area, who decided to not add setup to their NTSC broadcasts. It looks so much better, with actual real blacks, that it's hard to switch back to a "regular" station afterwards. Looks more like ATSC actually...

without having to re-render all of my original clips.

You could convert PAL MPEG to NTSC MPEG, but this would not be kind to the content. Rendering MPEG compression on top of MPEG compression is not so hot...

Most of the time, a PAL DVD will play on a computer. I would specifically ask them if they need NTSC.

Or it might be easier to take the DVD somewhere and do a standards conversion to another DVD.

Dave T2

Hi T...,

Maybe this answer comes too late. But I also produced some PAL and NTSC DVD's using PAL source material in DVDA3. This will not affect your original video clips.
It's quite easy really with DVDA.

In this part of the world (Europe) our TV sets play both PAL and NTSC source material. Not so in the US I found out the hard way several years ago.

Ciao, Dries.

I just did this - Open the DVDA project, Save as XXXNTSC version.dar, change project properties to NTSC and let DVDA do the rest. Worked fine here.

Yes, that will work. But if you are using mpeg files in DVDA (i.e. you've rendered to PAL mpeg in Vegas) then DVDA will be re-rendering that PAL mpeg file to NTSC mpeg. I've found this still can look pretty good, but not as good as if you render the files directly from PAL DV to NTSC mpeg in Vegas.

If you use DV (.avi) files in DVDA, then it should be similar/same as rendering from Vegas, except Vegas gives you more rendering options.

Mark

The BIG problem with just letting DVDA dumbly handle the encoding is you need to apply the Reduce Interlace Flicker switch to the media. Without that you'll get some nasting aliasing when the frame is resized. It's not terribly obvious but quite some time ago someone heaped lots of scorn on using Vegas to do standards conversion and this was the reason those nosty little jaggies were showing up.
Of course all of that might have been fixed in V6.0b and DVDA 3, I haven't done a conversion since the upgrade.
The other way to do this is rather than resize the frame you can crop the frame. That avoids the aliasing problem, probably renders faster too as you also don't need to render at Best for the best result.

Ah, what the heck, it's only NTSC, they'll never notice anyway :)

Bob.