Perrone/Randall

I want to say thank you very much for helping me and guiding me thru these steps. Yes I did sucessfully author good quality DVD with this procedures. I am very pleased with the sharp clear video, however I do have a tiny bit of diasappointment about the widescreen. The picture screen shows a little bit to wide, making the subject slightly fat. Other than that I am happy and will continue to use this setting.

This is why I convert everything to square pixel IMMEDIATELY in the work flow. Otherwise these pesky problems keep up. I would suggest that to you in your workflow. Get everything to square pixels as soon as possible. Then you can just do everything else in square pixels with no more conversion ratios. It's SO much simpler and foolproof.

Square pixel? where? I don't see it any where. Can you do a screen shot. Always something new poping up for me to learn. :) A side from that. I inserted the DVD onto the DVD player and view it on my old 52" 1st Generation 730P HD TV. Picture look very sharp. I just pop that DVD onto my computer drive and view it on my 21.5" widescreen
1920 x 1080 its stunning I can say wow this time. Freeware can do such a good job on downconversion. Sony software developers/engineers should be ashamed of themself, a $600 software can not beat a freeware.

I'll work on this for you when I get home tonight. I haven't eaten all day and I'm HUNGRY! And don't be too hard on Sony. NONE of the other NLE manufacturers do any better. Adobe, Apple, Avid, all do about the same job. Which is nowhere NEAR as good as VirtualDub. That's why we use it.

That's true--if the original is interlaced to begin with. The NLEs alone do a pretty good job of downconverting videos that were already in progressive scan in the first place.

Randall what would be your VDub settings for the "Hollywood" look if your using progressive scan footage?

It depends on how many fps the progressive scan footage is shot at. If that footage is an actual 30 (29.97) fps, it cannot be properly converted to that "Hollywood film" look (which is 24/23.976 fps). Deinterlacing should not be used on already-progressive footage; otherwise, you will likely degrade the image quality. You could try processing such footage by multiplying by 4 in the Interpolate filter, then dividing the frame rate by 5 in the Decimate adjustment--but you still might not achieve the desired result.

If on the other hand that footage is 24 fps (in a 60i wrapper, as done in most brands of "24p"-capable camcorders) with pulldown added, then it should be IVTC'd instead of deinterlaced and interpolated. Video that is shot natively in 24p, such as those from certain Panasonic HD camcorders, should be left as-is as far as the frame rate is concerned.

The method I used above only works well with native 60i (59.94 fields per second) interlaced material.