I viewed some PAL footage out to my external monitor and the image looks bizzare. The best way I can describe it is the way a CRT looks when it's refresh rate is set really low. The image looked very stroby, especially in the whites, and bright areas. It was almost painfull on the eyes to look at.

I'm outputting the PAL signal via my NLE (Vegas 5) to a Canopus ADVC100, to a Sony Multiformat Production Monitor (PVM-14C5/1).

My NTSC footage looks fine- any idea what would cause my PAL footage to look like this?

Is your monitor set to PAL mode? My monitor doesn't automatically detect which format it's getting.

Mine does. I even checked and when it's recieving a PAL signal it says "PAL 50i" under the status menu.

Are you applying some effects to the footage? If Vegas is doing realtime effects it mightn't be able to keep up and you might be only getting 15fps or so (it will still output 50i to the convertor/monitor).

Try a prerender if this is the case.

No, raw footage untouched. PAL project, PAL footage.

It's hard to say ofcourse without access to the footage. But here
in Europe we have no problems with PAL like you are describing.
Perhaps the monitor is not doing a good enough job converting
the power cycles to match the PAL signal or something?