i am moving to France for 5 months and will be shooting there. I am getting a camera before I leave. I wlll also be editing there on an IMac. I have a lot of foortage I want to put together for a professional project shot on a sony TRV900.

my question is

will I be able to integrate the NTSC footage with PAL footage in editing?

I'm not sure whether I be distributing more in Europe or US, so I'm seriously thinking PAL for camera. Does that make the sony trv900 unusable for mixed shoots?

Thanks for any advice, personal experience and such

You cannot integrate PAL and NTSC footage in the same timeline.

But, you can convert one to the other with the Standards Converter from www.nattress.com.

Thanks for the info.

Does that mean that if I convert PAL to NTSC with the standards converter I can then edit all the footage on an NTSC timeline?

correct.

Thanks!

Just one more question. Is there any downside to this in terms of image quality or anything else?

Along the same lines, I want to do a special on the band "The Birds" To every season. Because of legal issues, some of the old footage is un availible to them but they told me they can get a lot of stuff that was done in PAL. I don't know if I want to do it in 24p or 60i yet but since it's more for video, I'll probably take the latter. That being said, I have no idea how to get the PAL footage into the computer since I don't have anything that plays PAL. I guess I may have to have it transferred to CD ROM somewhere. But once I convert it all into 60i or 29.97, will it look alright and give me the ability to edit what used to be several different formats?
' 60i, 30p, NTSC and PAL?