Hi Gerald. Another thing to consider is that you can get terrible flickering problems with lights when you run an NTSC cam in a 50Hz country. If the NTSC version has 1/50s shutter then it can work OK. If not, it probably can't.

BTW, I just tried a 24p clip on a 25p timeline in Vegas 9 and it does not play faster, even with absolute frames and resampling disabled.

Richard

Now that's interesting... (I did say I hadn't tried it) :-) but other people have raised this issue elsewhere, so I took it as read.

Was that just playing on the timeline, or rendered out at 25p and played back?

(I think when I get some time, I might experiment myself).

An NTSC XL2 will be a world of pain in PAL land (unless of cousre, you are shooting entirey in 24p for conversion to film) - lower resolution, issues with flickering lights, different colour system - and thats before you even try to sync the footage. Surely it can't be that much more expensive to get a PAL PD150/VX2100. Even the FX1's are really dropping in price (they're seems to be heaps on ebay since the Z5/FX1000 came out). Why do you specifically want the XL2?

Regarding the 24p into 25p it's easy to do, you just have to decide whether you want frame blending, frame duplication or sync issues. I regularly drop 24p stuff onto a 25p timeline, however it is HD so no colour/resolution differences and I only dp it for b-roll/cut aways and other shots where I don't need the audio.

There are loads of mint-conditioned Pal version XL2s on Ebay going at very, very low prices, especially in UK/Europe Ebay, and most will provide decent shipping costs to Oz. I don't see the sense in you buying an NTSC version for working in Australia.