I have done a comparison between 1080p exported from a PAL sequence in After Effects (AE does the rescaling) versus a full 1080p export subsequently downsized in Virtual Dub using Lanczos rescaling algorithm - and the second way is much better indeed. Much sharper.

@Nik Skjoth
For small project you might be able to do so. But it's not ideal to do it for a big project with thousands of clips. You'll be spending all your production time scaling those clips one by one in the timeline.

@Mike Hannon
What plugins do you use for Virtualdub to be able to read your 5Dmk2 files?

Hi Desmond,

I convert with Neoscene first, so I'm importing an AVI.

Not really... Premiere Pro CS4 allows you to make sequence setups of multiple formats in one single project. So you can simply do your edits in native res and after you are done, you do a "copy paste all" to a new sequense in SD, and while having everything selected you just right click and press "scale to frame size" voila!

Or you can throw the whole HD sequence into the SD sequence and scale it to frame size. Just like working in After effects with precomposed sub sequences... Easy as pie.

Nik that's just a neat trick. I didn't see/notice that feature before. I know we can do this in after effects.

Just wondering if anyone has had any luck with this method specifically with Canon5D files.
I managed to download it all and install the quicktime plugin but it keeps saying "unable to locate video codec to decompress video track"

Any ideas?

Cheers

TMPGEnc has a batch processor that's implemented in a common sense way (click on the "register batch process" instead of "start encode").

@ Rick Hill.
Virtualdub as of now doesn't understand Canon 5Dmk2 files. It doesn't have a codec to read in those 5D files. Hopefully they'll have an update for this soon.

So I exported an image sequence and resized each frame in Photoshop to SD image size. It was 10 minutes of footage and the export and resizing took about 4 hours on my 2.33Ghz 4G RAM Macbook Pro. Sounds like a lot of time, but really not with my specs. The import and saving of the new image sequence took maybe another 40mins. Thing is then I would have to re-render it again with sound put back in.

Anyways, the outcome was much better then any other option I've tried. I didn't get the moire and aliasing in the footage I was getting by just having adobe media encoder render my project out for DVD.

I compared the DVD to an actual Hollywood DVD played back in the same player on the same HD monitor and the jaggizes on diagonals were about the same. I think our perception is so critical because we see this great HD footage and used to believe the DVD was such a "perfect" format 6-7 years ago that we can't accept all the flaws we now see that probably were always there but we accepted it. Until HD came around.

I don't understand why AME isn't just taking each frame and resizing it like Photoshop does? Yes this would be time consuming, but shouldn't we have this option at least?

sounds like it could be a work flow for a short film or something but very time consuming.

I have found that the problem isn't that noticeable going straight to dvd. Basically I have found the following:

Canon 5D mov -> Matrox 1440x1080 AVI -> Edit -> SD Mpeg DVD = acceptable

Canon 5D mov -> SD AVI -> Edit (looks bad already) -> SD Mpeg DVD = still looks bad