down rezzing with the A1 and HD
 

I asked a form of this question, but just wanted to revisit it for one other question on it....

I know there are diff opinions on better quality in down rezzing the HD to SD in the corder vs on the computer with software.

But my question is, whichever is the better way/quality, will the finished product be as good, better, or worse quality than if I shot the A1 in SD to start with?

I ask because it would be nice to shoot HD and down to SD and later on go back and work with the HD. But if shooting it in the SD mode is better quality than downrezzing, be it in the camcorder or on a computer then I may need to rething things.

thanks
Jerry.

I have preordered a XH-A1 and downloaded one of the test .m2t files and brought it into Premier Pro. I opened a 4:3 project and just brought in the 1080i m2t file and simply scaled it down until it fit. Obviously because it's 16:9 there are "black bars" on the top and bottom. But other than that it looked great and played fine.

I do a lot of television and always submit in 4:3 and 29.97 for NTSC. I don't see why this method wouldn't work fine. Also, I think the HD footage just scaled down looked really crisp on the monitor, more so than my XL2 footage. Could just be my imagination. Thoughts?

Hello

from what I've read and finally experiemented with myself, shooting in HDV, capturing HDV then properly resizing to DV will yeild you a much better picture then shooting in HDV->camera downconvert in SD or shooting in SD. This is a general concensus from what I've read regardless of which HDV camera used. The idea is that you have much more video information to work from.

The trick is doing it properly, and it seems that there are manual intermediates that one must take to do so to achieve this.

More info here:
http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=70792

Man, Michael... you are so Anal retentive! Just crop the image down to 720X480 in the middle and forget all the other info. No one cars anyway! Or just shoot the HD footage off a TV with an SD camera... that'll work.

Infact, just shoot all your movies with a webcam and then upres them for HD distribution... Not much difference between 640X480 and 1440X1080. Pixels are so tiny!


;)

Hey Mike... let me know when you have the TMPGENC thing working with Virtual dub. I tried an HD-SD down convert straight from Premiere and you are right, it is lacking hardcore.


Matt