Yeah... I am delivering HD on BD's mostly, but made a couple of SD DVD's as well. Was prepared for problems after reading this thread, but am I just lucky or what?

- I can produce excellent SD out of Vegas (tested Edius as well), without any problems!

Piotr, just for curiosity, can you post details of your vegas template for sd dvd's.
And are you shooting with detail on or off ?

Thanks.
Paul.

Paul, using Letus I always have detil on; without the LEX I _sometimes_ turn it off.

As to the Vegas DVD templates: believe me or not, but I find the default (PAL widescreen) to work best.

The only thing I do before rendering is select all events and in the Properties, check "Reduce Interlace Flicker" (even though I shoot progressive only).

No Gaussian blur or other means of reducing the resolution are necessary...

My test thus far have been so-so. I met with a client the other day that had nothing but complaints, and some of them are valid, while others are not. I'm trying to determine if it's the resizing or the compression or a combo of both.

I'm using Vegas 8 with Adobe Encore CS3. Based on what some have shared about their process, I've got a couple things I'm trying, but I'm missing a couple of steps. Anyone willing to share in detail their process, please!

If somebody is managing to get "perfect" HD-SD downconversion with Adobe Premiere CS3 please let me know. Because I've tried every possible workflow and the result is just aweful and horrendous. If one wants decent SD footage, then shoot it with a decent SD camera. Fullstop. Or else we have two possible options:

1)wait for the new Sony software that will include HD to Sd conversion or

2)buy the nano flash and record SD via SD-SDI output and hopefully we have a decent SD footage.

I hesitate to post this in the face of so many highly technical solutions to the HD>DVD conversion problem, but here is my experience:
1) Shoot in 1080 60i HQ
2) Import the raw files with Sony Clip Browser
3) Use Cineform Prospect HDLink to convert the imported video to 1920x1080 30p, 10 bit, 4:2:2 Cineform CFHD .avi files
4) Edit in Premiere CS3, Cineform Prospect HD 1920 30p project
5) Compress the edited movie to 720x480 m2v directly from the timeline using ProCoder 3, or even the Adobe Main Concept compressor
6) Author & burn in Encore CS3
7) Compared to HDV (Sony Z1, V1), or SD (Sony PD 170), these are the best looking DVDs I have ever made. Viewing on a large HDTV with "upscaling" DVD player, they look broadcast quality to me.
Possibly some of the posters in this thread are aiming for higher standards than I can percieve, but by no stretch of imagination does the above DVD workflow/output look "bad", or unacceptable.

mpeg streamclip rocks!
 

I have experienced great results with downscaling 1080i60 to SD while using mpeg streamclip.

The trick to minimizing artifacts is to export to a good codec. I have great results when exporting/downscaling to Apple ProRes 422 or Apple Intermediate codec.

For Windows users try exporting to the Cineform codec.

I also check the "Better Downscaling" and "Interlaced Scaling" options in the Export dialog.

For 16:9 clips I manually select the frame size to 854x480.

After the scaled export is finished you may use the mpeg encoder of your choice.

Cheers,
-GReg

I've managed to get amazing downsized SD, only to have issues with the mpeg2 compression. I frameserve out of Vegas to Vdub and use it's 'resize' filter with the 'Lancsoz3' filter mode. Saving small clips as uncompressed avis out of Vdub looks spectacular! Super sharp, detailed, etc. But when I use CCE or Hcenc to encode, I get some rough looking stuff.

I started a thread about this process here: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=125703

There is a 30 second sample clip for anyone to download and run their 'best' process on to produce a DVD-compliant .m2v file, and an ftp to upload the results for comparison. I can't seem to find a way to get close to that down-sized, uncompressed glory! All my attempts so far are just weak. Maybe I'm expecting too much?

HD>SD: I did a looooot of tests and down the line my result was just to put the flickerfilter (set to max.!) in FCP above all the stuff and that works just great! Still gets a razor sharp picture (don't worry about the setting to maximum - you won't get a blurry picture!), but flickering on lines or stuff with high contrast is almost gone! So that's all I am doing:
Cutting on a XDCAM timeline, setting the flickerfilter, rendering all and exporting as a self contained qt-file and rendering with compressor or idvd. Result is a sharp sd picture but without the flickering on hard contrasts or thin lines.