Exactly, it's like a no win situation until you can purchase a HD burner and burn the HD content in it's native and higher bitrate. This is the option I am holding out for to be honest. In the meantime, I am after trying the frameserve going to stick with my output.

Daniel: I am not sure to be honest. It was weird what it did. It actually looked worse upon the encode which I did in the Cinemacraft Basic. It also distorted the audio very badly. I am thinking it is a possibility(maybe remote) that it may be a conflict with the Matrox hardware/drivers. Though, I am not sure and somewhat doubt it. I just don't want to crash the system experimenting, so I simply uninstalled it. But all I did was change to the YUV2 and thats it. I let it frameserve, brought the file into Cinemacraft Basic, encoded like usual and that was it. But yup, it did look worse than the I-frame. Alot worse unfortunately.

I downloaded Aspect HD (Cineform) and tried that out. The resulting file looks very good but I'd have to look at two monitors side by side to tell if it's any better than the wmv file I made a few days ago. The file size is three times as big as the wmv file, which is not important for a DVD but just thought I'd mention it.
After burning the DVD the video looks just ok on a 57" hd tv-- pretty much the same as the DVD made with a wmv file instead of the Cineform avi. Ah well- it's good practice.

Have any of you tried encoding directly back to the native HDV format from your editing timeline, and if so how was the quality of that approach in CS3? That's what I've been doing from Edius and the results look fine when played on a Sony Playstation 3 to a 1080p HDTV.

The problem with going back out to HDV is it is an mpeg format which is horrible for compression and re-compression.

I was playing with Huffyuv again but it gives me major errors in vista so I am back to the drawing board and think I am going to try uncompressed .avi for awhile until I have more time to play with it all.

Julian

I'd appreciate a report on how that goes Julian. The one time I exported an uncompressed file it was so big I thought it was a mistake. 5 minutes of edited video came out to over 40gigs!

I've been using DebugMode Frameserver to export my Cineform Aspect HD project to TMPGEnc... looks great and gets around having to have huge files hanging around on your harddisk.

Greg: I gave up on Huffyuv as I was getting comm errors in vista. I searched all over the place but wasn't able to solve the problem (tried an earlier version) and Nero wasn't installed along with all the other possible solutions.

I've given up to be honest for now and I am just exporting right to DVD mpeg2 from the Adobe timeline.

Hopefully soon I can afford cineform but I hate parting with that kind of money just to be able to output from Premiere.. ah well :)

Julian

Dare I say it...I had a pleasant output in 720p HD from the newest Divx. Way better experience than QT or WM and it works like an avi codec. I just used the free version and chose their High Definition profile from premiere's export movie. The Divx player works great in full screen 720p on my laptop. And its cross platform (mac and pc).

I don't know if I would use it as an archival format, but it looks good for playback and works.

Julian I think I told you earlier to try out HuffYUV, I had crashes on XP with version 2.2, but 2.11 works for me. I use it for my archival format.

Last week, I used it for a client that wanted to have the HD video loop at their booth at a convention from a laptop to a HDTV, I think via dvi. I gave them a DVD and divx. I think the divx file looked a lot better at full screen. And the divx player didn't have any garbage associated with it, just alt+enter and full screen looping. And the player had the right adjustments for 16x9.

tup

I`ve kind of given up for now. I just archive all my raw footage to DVD (dual layer if need be) and export my created content to my preferred format for the project and will worry about creating and exporting a working format later on.