I'm Blown Away!
 

Well, you may think this is rather funny or odd, but I just burned my first SD DVD from some Canon A1 footage. I took a dance recital clip and put to DVD to show at the rehearsal tomorrow and watched it on my 32" SD Tube TV.

All I can say is....
WOW!

Even the footage that didn't have any lighting and only used the low light preset I made looks stunning.

Sorry, but I just had to share with you all. I've seen what this does on a HDTV but I wasn't expecting the SD stuff to be all that much better... but it is!

Yea I burned some footage also on a DVD, looked great on our SD TV as well. I'll never get rid of our tube television, they are sharp as heck and makes SD footage look amazing.

- Kyle

I can't wait to get rid of my SDTV and get HDTV.... I don't watch much shows on TV anyways. I bet a 50" Tube HDTV would be awesome, but would break the floor. IMO, tubes look much better than LCD/plasma when it comes to color and the overall "look".

Jerome, how do you convert your hd footage to sd then to dvd? Some ppl here used TMPGenc and claimed the result is excellent. Interested to see how you to do.

I use Vegas7e.
Basically, I dropped the HDV footage in a 1080i timeline and edited away and when finished editing I switched it to a SD timeline and rendered to SD... that's it. The A1 downconvert is soooo much better than the Sony HC1 downconvert.

Normally, I will render out to a HDV file then import that to a new timeline and do my SD render so I won't have to re-render the effects, transitions and such. I do this because most of the edits are rendered to HDV for later HD delivery as well as SD.

I used Vegas 7e to render my last production (marketing video for a restaurant) shot on both the XHA1 and DVX102B.

When I viewed the DV tape on my Sony Wega (it was done in SD), it looked really good. I have yet to watch the DVD on any HDTV yet but I watched it on my BenQ 24 inch LCD (which is more unforgiving on SD stuff compared to my Wega) and the quality drop was suprisingly little compared to the original DV footage. I just render it as mainconcept MPG from Vegas and use the DVD Architect to create the final DVD. Excellent stuff! :D

I used Vegas 7e to edit the Canon A1 footage. The video quality was rendered as MainConept MPEG2 using 2-pass variable bit rate with the BEST qaulity option selected. The DVD video quality was really good when viewed on a Samsung 3296 LCD. It is significantly better than the default setting (single pass variable rate with good quality option).

By good or best quality options, I assume you mean the rendering option available in the first tab?

I never tried the 2 pass thing, so I'm trying it now :)

Yes. How is the test?

I too have created a custom Mpeg-2 template using 2-Pass and the "High" quality setting to make DVD's. Though I believe the latter is better than the default, I can't definitively say it's monumentally better and it takes twice as long to encode. :)