So how would that work then, assuming menus were designed with a PAR of 0.9 at a rresolution of 720 x 480, and suddenly have to go to a PAR of 1.066 and a resolution of 720 x 576?
Then there are the overlays, same problem.
Colours - NTSC uses a different colour space to PAL.
Video files: FRame Rate is completely wrong, so is the resolution, which means every frame would have to be filtered for colour, altered the PAR, and change the resolution by rresizing - frame by frame.
Any chapter points would be out of whack, as would all sync points.

It's a lot more complex than you might think - plus you have different spec variations for each standard as well.
It cannot be done this way.

I agree with BJ. I am in NTSC land. If I need to send a project to a PAL location, I export from Encore as....NTSC.

As Neil has pointed out before, a huge percentage of PAL DVD players can read NTSC discs.

If one is in PAL land, then it becomes a little trickier. With few exceptions, however, a PAL author who knows his product is going to be viewed in North America creates 2 versions of his project from the get-go. Neil can correct me if I am wrong.

Hence, the number of authors who need an "automatic" conversion from NTSC or PAL or vice-versa is relatively small. Unfortunately in this case, Hugh, you seem to be one of those.

And, IMHO, you have greatly oversimplified the programming that would be required to effectively and accurately convert a DVD project from one format to another.

A million hours is more than 114 years. Considering Encore as a product has existed only since the end of 2003 (about 3 years, total), I seriously doubt millions of hours have been spent with Encore tech support.

I could be wrong, but if I am- think of the profit! :)

> Many DVD players do scaling and frame blending/dropping during playback in order to display PAL on NTSC and vice versa. It baffles me why Adobe did not include a simple conversion dialog to do the same thing in software.
Of course it's going to be of inferior quality than a hand built project- you get what you pay for. But right now trying to convert an NTSC video with subtitles created in Encore I'd much rather pay 10 seconds of button clicking as opposed to 5 days of redoing the whole thing.

Because this is not a simple thing! Period.
Going from PAL to NTSC is easier, but not by too much whilst still maintaining quality. You are adding vertical rresolution & changing the frame rate, and also altering the colour balances & IRE levels.
Think about this for a minute.
Adding in specialised PAL>NTSC functionality would add around $200 at least to the product price.
Going from NTSC>PAL is far worse, as you will - inevitably - get a speed difference of 4% in the converted file, requiring correct use of pitch changing, and again this will dramatically add to the cost of the application.
Now we move to the menus.
These would of necessity have to be created in Square Pixels at 720x540 & resized - because not only is the vertical resolution different, the Pixel Aspect Ratio is also different.

Your best solution is DV Film Atlantis.
Encore DVD - like every other authoring package - is not & should not be a video editing & conversion suite. It is down to you as the author to feed the correctly formatted & prepared assets.
Sorry, but it's not down to Adobe to do the conversions - I can hear the complaints about how it loses quality already.