John Rich

I'm trying to get a precise workflow for progressing from HDV footage captured by a Cannon HV20 to either a wide screen DVD or a BluRay DVD.

At present, I'm using , 1. Automatically convert to Cineform Intermediate 2. Quality -High, with Progressive checked 3. Resize - None. for the HDLink.
Then I use a Cineform 30P Premiere Pro project to edit.
I export out of that using File-export- movie with the Cineform HD export and Fields -None (under keyframe and renedering).
I've been setting the resolution under video to either 720x480 or 1440x1080 depending whether I want the final DVD to be SD or BluRay.
Then I import the AVI into Encore and set that to automatic.

I think this works ok, but I noticed in reading this forum, that some authors were resizing to square pixels on capture. Since I only have ASpectHD and not Prospect, I would have to capture at 1280x720 for square pixels, and I was just wondering, if I should do that instead of not changing the resolution on capture as I am presently doing.

Secondly, I noticed that Procoder was being used to encode the AVI from Premiere, to import into Encore for the DVD, and I was wondering, if I should consider this option, or with my camera being limited to HDV it would make a significant difference.
Finally, any recomendations to my work flow would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
John Rich

Robert Young

John
I switched to Prospect and a 1920 sq pix workflow to accommodate the Sony EX1. I noticed that from the sq pix avi I was able to get cleaner imagery when transcoding directly to DVD, BR, Flash, iTunes. Previously, using HDV 1440 1.33par, I always had to downscale the avi to 480 1.2 par to get the best DVD. That gave me the idea that maybe all the "pixel shifting" between 1.33 and 1.2 plus transcoding was making life difficult for those pixels. I tried importing HDV as CFHD 1920 sq pix and compressing directly to DVD and it worked well- just like the EX1 footage, but of course the HDV images are inherently not as good as the EX1 for a variety of reasons. The HDV sourced DVD imagery from 1920 sq pix may be a bit better than the HDV 1440 1.33 on DVD using my old workflow, but not jaw dropping. Mostly, it's just a simpler workflow.
I would be leery of dropping the HDV down to 720 sq pix avi. I never tried it, but I suspect a price will be paid for the downconversion, plus you would be adding one more step to the process.

__________________
Bob Young
www.IronDocVideo.com