How does other HD material look on your set? The component inputs will carry whatever signal you send through them. There's been some anxiety over a broadcast flag that studios could eventually use to force people to use HDMI to carry full HD signals but that's not in play in your case since it's coming from your A1U.

I guess the first thing to check is make sure your broadcast HD channels look good. Easiest one to check is HDNET as that's always going to look the best because Mark Cuban knows how to do it right. If that looks good then there might be something else at work but the component concern is way down the list. Does your set have some kind of setup option for automatically setting the resolution for the component input so in the case of the A1U it would automatically run it through at the sets native resolution of 1080i.

Just a thought. Good luck. I'm going to bed. :)

Cheers

Seeing your footage on a smaller screen will definitely look better. I'm guessing you have a CRT based HDTV if its native resolution is 1080i? My HDV footage looks a lot better on my 34" Sony HD CRT (1080i) than it does on my 50" Sony LCD HDTV (720p).

One thing I just remembered and it may not apply here is that some TVs have two sets of component inputs but one might only be 480i and the other 1080i. I think I recall a Samsung DLP that was like that. Might be worth looking into..

Hey Alex and Mohit, please see this thread (by yours truly). If you are using Premiere Pro 2 and Adobe Media Encoder to go from HDV to DVD, you are losing a lot of quality, but there is a fairly simple (and free) workaround that will give you stunningly better results.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=70792

Hey everyone, I made a mistake. My memory served me wrong, and it wasn't the component cable that was giving out the unimpressive resolution. It was the A/V cable, which brought it down to I guess SD? Maybe less than SD? I plugged in the component cable into the Y/Pb/Pr Component input in my HDTV and now the picture is much better. I'm impressed with the improvement, however, still not totally satisfied with HDV in general. There are still very noticeable improvements that can be made. For the record, my HDTV is a Syntax Olevia 27" HDTV 16:9 LCD, HD-Ready.

I read this somewhere: "Component In (YPbPr) for progressive scan and (YCbCr) for interlaced scan." Is that true? My footage is 1080i, so interlaced not progressive, but when I plug the component cable into the YCbCr holes, I can't get any picture (just blue screen) to display on my TV, even when I go to the source and say its YCbCr. But when I plug the component cable into the YPbPr holes, the picture comes out as HD resolution, though I'm not sure if its interlaced or progressive now. And if it's progressive, did I just lose some resolution from the de-interlacing that must have occured somewhere?

More from that review: "A Toshiba SD-6915 DVD changer with progressive scan output was connected to the YPbPr component input on the LT30. A Dish Network PVR was connected to the S-Video input. According to the manual, there is a second component input labeled YCbCr for interlaced input. In spite of it being labeled differently than the progressive scan input (YCbCr is the nomenclature for digital component input), we suspect that both are analog component inputs. The bottom line is that there are two component inputs, but only one is designated for progressive scan inputs."

And from another review, which seems different than the above review: "Along the bottom edge you have the separate SD and HD component jacks (where ‘SD’ means it only accepts 480i, and ‘HD’ means it accepts 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i signals), plus associated RCA stereo audio jacks for each input. In addition, this area also features all of the ‘output’ jacks, including a headphone jack, stereo RCA jacks, and a subwoofer RCA connector. Needless to say, that’s a ton of cables crammed into a very small space, and you might need to pull cables in front to get to the cables in back. I would have loved to see two full component inputs here as well, rather than one ‘crippled’, but for people without progressive-scan DVD players, the TV will take care of progressive-scanning the input on the SD jacks, and that leaves the other set available for full hi-definition off of a receiver or cable box, or XBox! If you have multiple hi-def component inputs, you’ll certainly want to invest in a component switcher, a home theater system that does switching, or a higher-end switcher/scaler."

Thanks for all the help.

I have another question though. Most people will probably not shoot their HDV project and have the final editted version printed back to tape for the purpose of putting that tape back in their camera, plugging in the component cable, and watching the hi-def resolution that way. I would imagine most people would bring the footage on their tape into a NLE (non-linear editor program) and edit their project, then render it into some kind of format using whatever codec.

My question is how can I render to a format/codec that will retain as much of the native HDV resolution that I can. I know when using capturing applications like HDV Split, the files are captured as .m2t (transport mpeg2 files), and the resolution and quality cannot get better than that coming from a HDV camera.

However, putting these .m2t clips into the editing timeline and rendering to whatever end format will lose some quality, right? Even if I'm using a virtually lossless codec like HDV-1080i intermediary Cineform codec, right? Or is this incorrect? Then, after changing the .m2t files, which are difficult to edit with, to the Cineform intermediary, I'll have to re-render again to my end format, maybe .mpg4? I've heard .wmv or .mov is more for web files, but they greatly lose resolution?

What is the best end format to render as to save the resolution. I don't care about file size and compression, unless the compression does not lower resolution, not even slightly. I just want the best format to retain as much resolution as possible.

As I understand it, even the best format at the end is not up to par with the native .m2t file, but it can be close, right?

In the end, what I'd like to do is film using my A1 (HDV 1080i), put it on my computer and render as a format that loses as little resolution from the .m2t file as possible, then be able to play it from my computer while it is connected to my HDTV and have my HDTV display the hi-def resolution. Is that possible? What connection would I use to connect my computer to HDTV to retain the resolution? VGA (it didn't seem like HDV to me)? S-video? Haven't tried personally.