Gear:

Using Mac G5's
HRD FX1
FCE HD
DVD SP3

Desparately seeking a quality method to get HD onto SD DVD's for distribution of school videos.

I have amazing footage in HD. But when I downsample to SD DVD it looks worse than DV (Motion artefacts, jitter, etc)

I think the problem is with the MPEG converter buillt into DVD SP3 since I can produce very good .movs with Virtualdvhs + mpegstreamer.

But I may be wrong.

Has anyone found a solution to this?

Would using a different codec make a big difference?
What are my options (Free or within £500)?

Any help really appreciated

Dave

Dave,

There is a HUGE difference in encoders-decoders. Using the M2T files from the HD10, I am very pleased with the results from TMPGEnc. It's a very inexpesive MPG encoder for PC. It "finds" my Elecard MPG decoder and creates a DVD MPG2 file in one step. There are many options, and it takes some work to find the best settings. Additionally, you can map the input resolution to the output res., allowing letterbox, cropped, or something in between.

I know! I see you use a Mac. I just wanted to point out that what you want to do CAN be done, you just have to look. Maybe get a cheap PC, you might pay for it with the wide variety of shareware and freeware thats available!

A company recently introduced a Mac PCI card with a hardware MPEG converter which is supposed to give good results and save time burning DVD's. It's discussed in a thread *somewhere* around here...

bitvice produces great results for me. I edit in DVCPro HD then go right into bitvice. There is a demo you can check out here:
http://www.innobits.se/

Just best sure to stay away from color space conversions during your post process and it looks great.

My 2 c,
Eric James