kev, very nice thread =). thx for starting one! this has been very helpful!

i shot a wedding on XL H1's 24F mode. i put together a rough cut and rendered the entire project using the methods described in this thread. i want a progressive DVD, so i went with 24p widescreen. i noticed that there was a 2:3 pulldown process. i've also tested this with a normal widescreen render.

i noticed the following:
-the 24p render has more haze/blurriness to it.
-the non24p has a lot of interlacing.

how do i manage a balance of both?

do i need 2:3 pulldown for XL H1's 24F?

i've done a few tests with very short clips of 'm2t's and i wasn't satisfied with any of the set footage from the templates. is there anything else i'm missing? do i have to apply a filter to adjust the image?

to: XL H1 owners, how do you render a nice pro looking DVD with 24F?

HDV 16:9 to cropped SD 4:3?
 

I've searched the forum but cannot find the answer yet. Here's what I would like to do. Shoot in HDV widescreen. Capture as HDV. Then have the option to either leave it in 16:9 or to convert it to SD 4:3.

The issue is that I want the image to be cropped on the sides and still fill out the screen from top to bottom in SD. I know that if I take an HDV 16:9 image and put it in a 4:3 timeline - what I am getting is a letterboxed image - sides cropped like I want but bars added at the top and bottom.

I don't want letterbox - I just want the sides cropped off - you know the same as you get when you have a widescreen image converted/croppred to full screen on a DVD. How can you do this? tks

If using Vegas, then open your Pan Crop window for the clip, right click on the clip and select match output aspect ratio. Thsi should enlarge your video to you can scale down accordingly, to match 4:3 DV fotage.

Then why shoot SD??
 

It worked fine. I opened the pan/crop and selected the 4:3 mask and then output it to to SD NTSC using the render. It will now play on a 4:3 TV screen I presume just fine.

This being the case then if you have a HDV Camera - why shoot in std DV? You can always capture as m2t transport file and then crop to 4:3 if you need to for whatever reason but you have the original in the best resolution as you possibly can?

Am I missing something here? Please advise-I see no reason to shoot SD.

That's basically correct: there are very few reasons to shoot in SD once you have an HD camera, and shooting in HD allows you to output both widescreen and 4x3 SD of the same material at full quality -- something you can't possibly do with any SD camera.

The only reason to shoot SD is if you need to deliver a miniDV tape in SD (DV) format. I’ve done gigs where I was just asked to shoot something because I was local and send a tape to an editor who expected a DV tape. In that case, it’s nice that my Sony Z1U can shoot DV, DVCAM, and HDV. But for myself, I never shoot SD anymore.

~jr

I can see why but if you wanted the absolute best quality - you could shoot it in HDV - crop it to SD and then Print to Tape - but that would be many extra steps I'm not sure I would want to do - unless it was for myself.

One extra step. Not many.
And if you want to stay widescreen, which is the smarter thing to do, then it's zero extra steps.

So I think I found my major problem.

I had been editing HDV on a NTSC Widescreen Timeline.

So correction (1), change my timeline to match what my footage was shot in, HDV60i.

Now when I go to render as a DVD are people seeing better results with:
NTSC DVD Widescreen (default to 30i)
NTSC DVD Widescreen 24p
NTSC DVD Widescreen (Custom to Progressive 30p)