A client brought me footage shot on an HDV camcorder for use in a DVD to be shown at a sports banquet tuesday night. Knowing that delivery would NOT be in HD, I down-converted the footage out from the deck and captured in DV through FCP. The video looks a bit soft althought the HD footage looked fine in the deck.

The edit is done but my question is, can I recapture in HD and re-conform for better results or is there a better capture setting in DV out of the deck that will give me better results?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions the community might offer.

Reed

Let me suggest my workflow as follows:

Capture and edit in HDV. Export HDV movie from FCP.
Downsize to SD with MPEGStramClip from www.squarred5.com
Encode SD file.

Hope this helps. P.

Edit: Please note that interlaced material is suboptimal for down-rez.
If possible de-interlace before down-scaling for better results.

I will give it a try. May have to reacapture the existing footage though.



Reed

You can stay HDV the whole way to compressor or whatever you use to encode and create a squeezed image. That way the most information gets to your encoding software and when you reach your authoring software like DVD Studio Pro you can flag your video track so it will be letterboxed on SD screens and unsqueeze on HD screens or projectors.

There's no need to use MpegStreamClip. James is right, your downconvert should be the last stage of the process and Compressor is the best place to do it.

You can stay HDV the whole way to compressor or whatever you use to encode and create a squeezed image. That way the most information gets to your encoding software and when you reach your authoring software like DVD Studio Pro you can flag your video track so it will be letterboxed on SD screens and unsqueeze on HD screens or projectors.

Did I suggest anything else? Yes with one exeption: downsize before encoding,
because this is a tricky job and not many an encoder does that job really outstandigly well.