I am sure that this has been dealt with before. I use a Z1 for underwater video and would prefer to film at 60i, but I have a lot of customers who need PAL DVD's at 25fps. The change from 30 fps to 25 fps causes jerky movement unless I use frame blending in Premiere Pro which reduces the sharpness. Are there any better suggestions?

I don't use Premiere, but I think you need some other software to convert NTSC to PAL. Also realize that the PAL frame size is larger (720x576 vs NTSC 720x480) so you are bound to get some softness.

DVfilm Atlantis is one way to do the conversion:

http://dvfilm.com/atlantis/index.htm

And I think DVfilm Maker will also convert in the NTSC > PAL direction:

http://dvfilm.com/maker/index.htm

There are free trial versions that you can check out. I don't use PC's, but seems to me I've read that Vegas can do these conversions as well. But since you have a Z1 it seems like you might just want to shoot 50i and then you could convert to 24P for the NTSC version using something Like DVFilm Maker. Or for that matter, my understanding is that just about all DVD Players that are sold in PAL countries can also convert NTSC on the fly.

I don't use Premiere, but I think you need some other software to convert NTSC to PAL. Also realize that the PAL frame size is larger (720x576 vs NTSC 720x480) so you are bound to get some softness.

DVfilm Atlantis is one way to do the conversion:

http://dvfilm.com/atlantis/index.htm

And I think DVfilm Maker will also convert in the NTSC > PAL direction:

http://dvfilm.com/maker/index.htm

There are free trial versions that you can check out. I don't use PC's, but seems to me I've read that Vegas can do these conversions as well. But since you have a Z1 it seems like you might just want to shoot 50i and then you could convert to 24P for the NTSC version using something Like DVFilm Maker. Or for that matter, my understanding is that just about all DVD Players that are sold in PAL countries can also convert NTSC on the fly.

There's also Twixtor for Premiere Pro. It's supposed to be the "bee's knees" for frame rate conversion. If you don't have ConnectHD, it'd be more than worth while getting... any frame conversion would be best done as uncompressed CFHD 1440x1080 1.333 PAR avi, before rendering to 720x576 PAL to keep the quality as high as possible.

For those with Vegas, the abilities to transcode HDV of various frame rates has apparently been improved in version 6, and tools such as Gearshift are available to 'automate' frame rate conversions using proxies to maintain quality and speed the editing process.