Down-converting focus problems?
 

I have read that if you down-covert HDV to DV, there could be some focus problems, as what is in focus for HDV may not be the case when down-converting for DVD.

Has anybody had any problems with this and how would you get around it?

Thanks

It's more the other way around. Focus problems when shooting in HDV that are apparent on a good HD display can go away when downconverted. It just depends how badly out of focus you were.

Put another way...focus is critical and easy to mess up when shooting in HD because of how much detail HD can resolve. Upon downconversion, much of that detail is lost, so if there were small errors in focus, often they get "covered up".

Make sense?

Thanks Nate, I guess you just have to make sure your focus is exemplary, which is critical when shooting HD anyway.

...unless you're downconverting to SD for your end product. Then you have a little room for error.

One other thing to keep in mind is that some editing applications do not do a very good job down-scaling HDV to DV resolution. Premiere Pro 1.5 is one of them. I've tried downscaling HDV footage within an NTSC DV project and the results were very soft. The same procedure done in After Effects was significantly sharper. Likewise, using Premiere Pro to export a HDV project directly to DVD (without going to DV first) seemed to work well too. (It may be relying on the Main Concept scaling algorithm rather than its own.)

It's a good idea to test all the options available to you to see which procedure produces the best results.

Right. I went on a rant on that subject in: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=63494

I've never seen this point made before. So which PC programs ARE good for downconverting to SD? (aside from Abobe AE) Vegas? Avid?