Hey all,

We have been doing 3 camera production for a while with the XL-H1 in HDV mode. The production and post have gone very smoothly aside from the long render times to SD DVD.

One client is reporting an odd phenomenon:
When the SD DVD is played on a 16:9 LCD, plasma, etc. all is great.
When it is played on a good quality 4:3 it letterboxes just fine and looks great.
When played on a cheap 4:3 tv, the line between content and the letterbox bars seems to jump fields consistently.
Apparently all of the past projects have a similar problem, but no one was looking at them on a tv with bad enough quality. We weren't able to reproduce it on our consumer TVs here. The client (and his in-house IT person) were able to reproduce it on multiple low quality tvs.

We have tried putting a 2 pixel matte in to see if it solves the issue. Apparently its better but not solved, plus it seems like a band-aid solution.

Does anyone have any insight on this? Is it a field priority issue?

Here are all the specs

Shooting specs:
3 cameras HDV 1080 60i DF
Editing in Final cut studio 2 with timeline options to match the source
Exporting via compressor SD DVD 6.2mbps dual pass VBR with better resizing.
Authoring & burning in DVDSP

Thanks!

Try just slightly blurring the edge of the letterbox if you can. If the edge is represented by 1 HD line of resolution, playback on an SD TV can cause that line to disappear and reappear every scan of the fields.

I don't understand "leterbox jumps fields", but I'd be interested to know what you mean. Can you describe this in a different way or tell me what it looks like?