Better to DownConvert in XH-A1 or NLE?
 

With the A1, you can down convert the footage from HD, I personally have not tried this. I have downconverted with Vegas and DVD arch. Which is best..how does the A1 do at this? Which final product looks the best..advantages, disadvantages? J

I've been shooting and editing everything HDV in FCP. But just to see what would happen, I dropped a clip into a regular SD timeline. FCP took it and wanted to render and it looked great.

I've found using the camera the easiest for me with very good results to both DV tape (via firewire) and Beta SP letterboxed (via component).

Biggest advantage IMHO is it's realtime.

Am I losing anything by capturing HDV and converting the files to SD in my NLE? I have been using editing intermediate HDV and rendering to HDV then letting My DVD Architect authoring render as SD..Looks great, but seems that letting the camera convert would certainly allow me to edit SD and render like I did with my XL2, I seem to do that well.

I haven't found any quality difference between converting to SD in an NLE and converting in real-time using the camera's downconvert function. I've tried a few different workflows, but because I want my new project to be available in HD (at some future point) I'm using Vegas as my NLE, editing in HD and producing the final edit in m2t format. I then export it to the camera in HD, switch the camera to downconvert to SD and play the tape back into the software (in SD). That works a treat and you have both formats available (plus, I guess, if I were organised enough to keep the tape, I'd have an archive of all my final edits on the tape in HD).

Not sure if that answers your question but basically for most purposes the camera does do a very good downconvert.