Best DVD settings
 

I shot HD on the Sony AX 2000, Edit HD in Premiere and then Scale down to DVD. I feel that shooting 60i for the stage shows I do gives the best results in camera quality.
My question is when I down scale should I deinterlace or keep it interlaced at upper field first?.......do DVD players produce better quality playing back interlaced or progressive footage in general?

Thanks
Ben

Re: Best DVD settings
 

DVD is generally an interlaced format.
If you are shooting interlaced UFF, you should maintain those parameters all the way to DVD disk.
All DVD players will play both UFF and LFF, but not all will play progressive.
Same deal for 1080 Blu Ray- stay interlaced, UFF, all the way.

Re: Best DVD settings
 

Thanks Bob!


Ben

Re: Best DVD settings
 

I shot 30p. Depends on your encoder, most of them will split the 30p half frame into 60i for DVD authoring. SO the video stream is 60i, but the content is 30p.

Re: Best DVD settings
 

Exactly- you can shoot either 60i or 30p, but for greatest player compatability, the DVD m2t file should be 60i.
Most encoders will convert a 30p original to a 60i PsF DVD file.

Re: Best DVD settings
 

When using Adobe Media Encoder to for HD to DVD encoding, be sure to check the "Maximum Render Quality" box to help with the downscale quality. Even with that, I've gotten superior results using an alternative workflow outlined here - HD to SD DVD – Best Methods | Creating Motion Graphics Blog | Blu-Ray DVD Authoring Menu | Precomposed

Uses free tools available online, but is for people who like to tinker, as it does take a little effort. The results are spectacular though. I'm in the middle of editing and delivering 8 dance recital programs shot as 1080i HDV and the HD2SD method is providing amazing results for me.

Jeff Pulera
Digital Vision

Re: Best DVD settings
 

Good advice.
Getting a really high quality DVD is way harder than one would think it should be.
Fortunately, Adobe CS5 has dramatically improved the downscaling & transcode from HD to DVD.
As a result, I will definitely use it when "good enough" is good enough.
Otherwise, the HD2SD workflow is terrific, or I can make a Cineform master file- 10 bit, 4:2:2 SD.avi, and transcode the master.avi to m2t with ProCoder3 (a very good transcode, plus it provides various tweakings and filters).
If the original footage was well shot, these DVDs, played in an "upscaling" DVD player, HDMI out to HDTV, produce images that look very near HD.

Re: Best DVD settings
 

I used to use the HD2SD methode with CF avi's but switched over to frameseving and TMPGenc giving me the same result.