Quality issues when played on HD/BR Player
 

I just delivered a finished DVD (SD quality) to my customers and they played it on their Sony HDTV through PS3 - and the image was horrible - major interlacing and very harsh edges and pixels. They flipped - and so did I. Turns out that PS3 does very poor job on upconverting images from regular DVD. We put the disc into "old-fashioned" DVD player and all went back to normal - like any other SD DVD played on HDTV - nice and soft.

Just a warning for everyone to make sure customer knows about limitations of their equipment and potential compatibility issues.

Me too
 

We had the same thing happen here is our fix:
Make movie with Apple Pro HQ codec and it goes away, (located in FINAL CUT PRO)
it is more steps but you can avoid some redos if you do it up front

Wow, that couldn't be more different than my experience. When I play DVDs that I've burned, in my PS3, they are virtually indistinguishable from HD. I can see the difference but my clients can't -- I have to freeze the frames and point stuff out before they see it. And the same is true for me with movies -- I have several on both BD and DVD and the DVDs are very, very close to BD quality. And this is on a pretty big screen.

Could it be your encoding settings or SW package?

A friend of mine that does videos also shared that the PS3 upconversion of DVD's produces stunning video quality.

I think it's the encoding settings - I think "deinterlace" is off. I will play with it over the week to determine the reason. BTW: I'm stuck with Adobe CS3 :-( need to play lotto more often...

I'm using CS3 as well and also have no deinterlacing. I just "Export to Encore" straight from the Premiere timeline and tweak the default settings to maximize the quality and bitrate. No sweat and near-HD regular DVDs.

I've been told that the hardware deinterlacing (if it is indeed necessary) done by your HDTV is better than any software deinterlacing you could do, so you should never deinterlace when rendering your final project. That may or may not be true, but following this advice has worked for me.

But I'm also usually using Cineform's Prospect HD. If it's a complicated project I export first to CFHD with "recompress" UNchecked. I then import the final rendered file back into a new timeline and do the "Export to Encore" from the single avi file.

Works perfectly and the output is stunning. Although I have to say I sometimes do simple projects just using the Adobe presets, no Cineform, and the results are identical.

Sometimes it's not only the upscale quality of the player but also the abilities of HDTV to handle the upscale (but definitely not in your case, since you tried in normal DVD and everything was OK). For example, PS3 connected on a 12th generation Plasma tv (far better than LCD/TFT) delivers stunning quality with deinterlaced footage (HD looks absolutely mind-blowing). Deinterlacing may be the problem sometimes, especially with the average quality LCD but it is still a problem that many TVs don't support progressive scan, so giving interlaced footage isn't the best of solutions, at least for me. The best way of deinterlacing is Magic Bullet Frames, especially the Plus version for After Effects, which although slow as a turtle, gives the best quality a software can give, almost equal to shooting native progressive.

Thx guys. I'll be playing with the export settings. Since it was only one incident like that then I think it must be related to customer's custom setup. Never had that issue with other HDTV setups.

PS3 has one of the best SD to HD upscale scheme available, be sure that they have the latest firmware, but I think it is more on your end, the way you downconvert to SD from HD, because they would have flipped way before you when they were watching DVD on it if PS3 didn't upscale it right, but why do you make them a DVD instead of a Blu-ray disc when they already have a PS3? I'm assuming you are already shooting HD, if not then you should. (-: