Recording mode Z1
 

My question is this.

Do you record in camera 1080i and then down convert as you capture.
Or do you record in camera 1080i and then down convert in yor NLE.

Whats the quality like if you record SD 16.9

I use Vegas as my NLE and at this point in time a Sony PD170.

Regards
Simon

Simon,

Given your proposed hardware and software you would record in HD 1080i, download in HD 1080i, edit in HD1080i.... then downconvert to SD16:9 when burning your SD DVD.

If this doesn't suit - you always record in HD, then downconvert upon loading into Vegas, but the former above will give a slightly better result.

I would simply not use a Z1 in SD - HD is so much better. Even after HD is converted to SD it is still better than straight SD.

I guess it depends on what you want. I record 1080i and set i.LINK CONV so I can capture as regular DV. I'm using FCP on a dual G5 2.5ghz machine however and usually just want to burn standard definition DVD's.

Once I tried capturing as 1080i and then downconverting in my NLE. It took almost 5 hours to convert 1 hour of footage and it really didn't look as good as the in-camera conversion. Not planning to try that again anytime soon :-)

Of course your results may be completely different with your hardware and software, and there may be better/faster options on the Mac as well. But no matter how you do it there will be a significant amount of render time and you will use twice the disk space if you convert with software.

I don't ever shoot with the camera in regular DV mode however. That is definitely not as good. But there might be times you'd want to do that anyway; for example, you might want a DVCAM tape to give someone right out of the camera.

My suggestion would be to record in HDV mode, and then down-convert in camera before editing. That way you have a HD master, and you can always re-capture in the future should you need to output the footage to a HD medium (when HD-DVD and Bluray become more widely available). But at the moment, chances are you're going to DVD - so you might as well just edit in DV, which will be faster and more hassle free. Although Graeme is right - if you're doing a lot of colour correction, etc. it's better to just natively edit HDV - but I personally find editing in HDV annoying (due to the MPEG compression)...

Thanks guys, some great info.


Simon

In my opinion shooting & editing HDV, then resizing to SD for DVD authoring yields a far superior picture in terms of sharpness and chroma, and unless you need heavy effects anc color grading, it does not require $10K computers.

It sure takes longer to finish your project... but once you try it, you will probably never go back to downconverting in camera and editing SD.

At least in theory, you should shoot in HDV and download in the same. If the footage enters the computer as SDV you lose the color sampling advantage HDV gives you.

SDV samples at 4:1:1 while HDV samples at 4:2:0. The MPEG-2 standard of the DVD also samples at 4:2:0, a perfect match with HDV. When transcoding SDV footage to DVD you completely lose the difference signal (the third element) and only use half the chroma that MPEG can give you.

This may all seem like jibberish but it translates to something simple: HDV transcoded to DVD gives you superior results than SDV transcoded to DVD.

Despite this technical reasoning, my experience in Transcoding from HDV to SD mpeg was not so good in Premiere, so I was transcoding to SD DV first. In this thread, it is suggested that you go HDV to an intermediate then to DVD mpeg:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...136#post739136

That's correct Chris, and it's not only your experience. The keyword in your sentence is "in Premiere" - it is unfortunate that Premiere does such a dissapointing job with the HDV to DV conversion. But it does a good job at editing natively, so that's the reason I edit HDV in Premiere but take it to VirtualDub + a third party MPEG2 encoder for the final steps.