Igor... I've been there myself. It shouldn't be that painful. My guess is that interlaced video is crossing you up. Remember that NTSC SD is lower field first. HD is upper first. If you don't make that conversion, you'll end up with really weird mice teeth. In the down-res, you might not even see them as such. It'll just make the video look like mud.

I'm going to do a lot of dual format (BD & DVD) output this year and I'm still working out the details. I'm seriously considering shooting everything progressive. That will solve a lot of issues.

Another vote for not doing the mpeg encoding within your NLE.

I render out to a 60i avi, retain that as a Master for later use, then encode to mpeg2 or H.264 using Procoder, which is great, or TMPGEnc which is also great and 1/5 the price.

When I had my Canon HV20 I captured in HDV, edited in HDV, and output to standard SD on regular DVD, it generally tended to look a bit better than DVD's produced from MiniDV. For HD output I did a couple of Blu-ray compliant renders to standard DVD and those played very well on a Blu-ray setup in Best Buy (I don't have anything to play Blu-ray at the house).

For my own HD viewing I rendered from the same timeline as all the above to HD WMV and HD MP4 file formats, watched those on my computer and 21.6" Samsung monitor for a while and now play those from thumb drives plugged into a little WD TV box connected to my 42" LCD 1080p TV.

All of the above renders were done on the same HDV timeline in Pinnacle Studio 11 (now 12) with no separate transcoding, intermediate, or de-interlacing steps. No hoops to jump through, just simple editing (a bit of patience on the 1920x1080 HD WMV renders).

Now, I fully understand, the Pinnacle product is not the darling of most folks. I've stuck with it from early versions because it has given me the most features for my buck, and I've been pretty lucky with it, it has done most of what I've asked of it and I still produce training videos in support of the Defensive Handgun course I teach, I submit to video challenges and just plain have a lot of uncomplicated fun with it.

Right now I work with a pair of AVCHD cams (Canon HF100's) and the only complaint I have is my quad core computer was not purchased with as fast a processor as I need.

I don't fault anyone elses NLE choice (I read that Sony Vegas Pro 8 does an excellent job of editing AVCHD) but just wanted to point out that there were some other choices that don't involve transcoding or intermediate codecs.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a render to avi is best if you do it uncompressed, which makes for huge files. If you go to DV avi, quality will be lost as it's a lossy codec.

Other lossless options are Quicktime with the Animation codec or DNxHD codec from Avid.

Now that`s an answer everbody would love to hear! ;) It`s been my dilemma since I started to look for an HDV camera...but all this jumble and mumble of encoding problems and variations are putting me off. I set my eyes on the canon XH A1, but some ppl seem to have problems with it, and others dont (when it comes to editing in a NLE of course..) This is exactly what I want to hear Bruce. If you can delve deeper into how did you actually output your HDV footage to a DVD and which settings did you use to render as a Blu ray footage, I would greatly appriciate! :)

Clayton shooting in HDV will give you a lot more opportunities for output than in DV and a better quality in whatever your output format. Shooting in HDV gives you the opportunity to crop to a 4x3 image for SD output or stay 16x9 as well as stay in HD for Bluray output. The post in my mind is not about the merits of HDV. The issue of encoding comes up when one wants the best output rather than just an output as most of the simple NLE's have a DVD output option anyway and the more Pro NLE's either come with an authoring package or simple DVD output. All have presets for encoding so there is no need to get into any fine encoding parameters. As I mentioned in my earlier post though there is a difference in the quality that these encoders output and I have stated my preference. Where the final image will be viewed is also important as for WEB or PC the issue of deinterlacing or shooting progressive is important. Igor didn't like the output from CS3 and I agree, hence my use of Edius, Vegas and TMPGenc. For authoring I use DVD Architect 5 or DVDLab 2.0.

Ron Evans

Personally I've found Vegas to have the cleanest and simplest path to DVD. It's a simple export, directly from the timeline. Make a few tweaks to the basic settings to get it just right and the video looks great. It is possible to get fantastic DVD video in FCP/Compressor & PPRO, but the hoops you have to jump through, seem unnecessarily complicated ...

You know I might get a few loughs here, but I use Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 for editing as well as to output whatever you want, DVD,Blu-ray, SVCD,MPEG,DV e.t.c. and so easy too. The results are outstanding!!!

Stelios