From HDV 50i/25f to HD-DVD (not Pal friendly)
 

Hi guys, this is my first post, I'm a filmmaker from Mallorca (Spain).

After a lot of reading and learning here there's something I'd like to discuss.

I have a Pal Canon XH-A1, I edit in Canopus Edius 4. My investigation target right now is to edit HDV wihtout problems and get a final DVD-R (or DVD-R DL) with the estructure of HD-DVD and play it in an Toshiba stand-alone player.

To do that I convert with procoder from the timeline (I edit raw .m2t captured with hdvsplit) from HDV 1440x1080 50i to Mpeg2 1440x1080 60i, 29.97 or 23.9.
I tried different options: interlaced upper field first, bottom field first and progressive.
It's necessary to convert to 60i because the HD-DVD format doesn't play properly material Pal sourced. So I hoped Procoder could perform a good conversion.
When I have the mpg from Procoder I import it in Ulead movie factory 6 in a hd-dvd project. This Ulead software is great. It's very easy to create a HD-DVD in a normal DVD-R.

The problem is that I cannot find a right setting with procoder because always the playback in my Toshiba is problematic. Stuttering mostly.

So the idea is wich could be the best method to convert europoean HDV material into an mpeg2 "american friendly" to be able to create a magnificent HD-DVD.

What are your experiences?

Shoot in 25F import your footage to a 1080 24P timeline and slow down your footage to 96% so each frame of PAL = 1 frame of 24p?

I'm actually beginning to wonder if we'll ever see a 50Hz 25FPS PAL freindly capability in all 'PAL market' HD players (given studio releases on HD formats all seem to be authored at 24FPS with pull down flags for 60Hz playback regardless if they're for PAL or NTSC market)

thanks for the answer Steven.

I've doing intensive research these days. With cineform is esay to transform to 24p (or 23,97) even during capture. Now the problem is that the most advanced software in PC to create HD-DVD does not support 24fps. Ulead MF 6 + converts always to 29,97. It's slow and the results are not good enough.

Can we fool Ulead with pull down flags so it would think the video is really 29,97 so it does not convert it?

This is an important matter por HDV users. The possiblity to get HD in a DVD-R (or DL) and play it in a HD-DVD player is absolutly great. But we have to fight to get the best quality possible during the process.

WORKING WORKFLOW in PC
 

I found a working workflow. I post a guide in this forum.