Pete,

that's why i asked. i see that you've done SD->HD upscaling and edit it all in 720p.

the groom is a tech junkie (also a good friend of mine). he wants 1080p for his HTPC. that's required.

so my gameplan is to upscale all SD footages to 1080, 24p. a great# of the cams will be el cheapo 1CCD SD (60i, right?). so i have first scale all SD to 1920x1080, 24p then convert XL H1's 1440x1080ix24F into 1920x1080x24p. the end result is a WMV-HD file that is 1920x1080x24p like Terminator 2 Extreme Edition w/similar variable bit-rate.

the SD-DVD output is for the rest of his relatives/friends. since bride+groom is the primary audience, i must accomodate =).

If that's the case, all I can say is that you ought to shot all of the footage in 1080i. I've yet to see any SD footage upsampled to 1080 resolution which looked like anything but oversized SD, and one such example was using a very expensive hardware upscaler. It will be immediately obvious to the groom on his setup when you cut back and forth from HD resolution to SD; enough so that he probably wouldn't be too happy about it.

Do you live near a video camera rental shop? If so you should at least get a Sony Z1U to use as your second cam, if another XL-H1 is not available. (Or find someone who owns an HDV camera and pay them to shoot with you.) Plus that way you'll have an all-HD project you can use as a demo for future potential HD customers.

I think you need to grasp an important concept here Yi... namely, if SD was capable of being upscaled to 1080 - there'd be no need for HD/HDV camcorders.

The only reason that 720p was brought into the mix of possible solutions for the 'problem' as you originally stated it, was that 720 HD is a much less destructive 'ask' of good quality SD than trying to stretch to 1080.

SD would still be noticeably worse at 720p if you didn't do 'some work' on both the 1080 and SD sources though.

Try going to 1080 if you want - but be prepared for seriously crappy looking results.

update: i just wanted to let you know that i eventually went with to each its own. meaning HDV stays with HDV and DV with DV. the other thing that really made me decide was HDV is 16:9 anamorphic progressive and DV is 4:3 interlaced. so... =). thx ya'll.