Hi,

Would it be better to shoot in HDV with the XL-H1 and then do a compression to DVD as opposed to shooting in the DV mode and then compressing?

Since HDV has a 4:2:0 color space, would this allow for a better looking DVD as DVD is 4:2:0 as well?

My experience is dat shooting HDV and bring that back to SD (your DVD for example) gives a much smoother & nicer result then the DV way. The other day I tricked someone this way who thought I had shot on DigiBeta..

So if you're workflow allows it, go shoot in HD.

...just when I'm burning my DVD from HDV I read this new thread. I can say I share the same experience as Michael, thou I have some artifacts problem sometimes, like white dots (or pixels) on black bars and card... someone knows why? I'm not shure if this have anything to do with HDV. And I don't think HDV render transitions from pitch black to bright film so beautiful - I recomend short transitions from black! Or what do you say out there? And do you have any suggestions for DVD-codec writer programs for mac? (I have FCP5 studio with DVD studio pro but would prefer something little more "simple")

Well, to be honest, for simple viewing/screening I use iDVD often, the quality is very good and more then good if you stay under the hour. If I have to make a master-DVD for duplication I use DVDSP in combination with Compressor.

No question, highest resolution source material is best. You don't necessarily get better resolution in the end, but you get a much cleaner picture. You'll have virtually no noise, no artifacts whatsoever (other than your DVD encoding MPEG2 of course). You basically will be indistinguishable from 35mm source material. If you use an SD camera, any artifacts of the DV compression, the codec, the processing, whatever, will be carried onto a 720x480 picture that you will never be able to fully get rid of. When that crap is on a 1440x1080 picture, downrezzing to 480p just gets rid of all of it. Heck, even down rezzing to 720p does the same thing. It looks like scanned film.