Ok, I have shot my first few scenes with my z1 and am eagerly awaiting the purchase of my new mac editting system and wanted to figure out the best way to go about editing my work. I want to be able to do the following: 1)deliver the scenes in 2 or 3 various file sizes/quality over the web, 2) sd dvd, 3) hd dvd at the end of the year as the first consumer players are brought to market. For those of you who do not remember my posts from a few months ago, I am shooting adult entertainment. I would love to hear any advice any of you might have about workflow i should use and also what you are finding best for your situation. And, I promise to hit up anyone who wants it with a copy of my finished work for review!

Also, anyone knowledgable with video lighting in the NYC area and willing to be on set and help out a newbie it would be much appreciated, and it is much better then going to Score's I promise! If you have some access to kino's that would help too!

The workflow I found that will work best for you is
1) Capture your HDV footage using the HDV 1080i60 preset in FCP5
2) Edit your footage in the HDV preset
3) When you are finished, create a SD sequence and drop the HDV sequence into it. This will be resized automatically, and you will end up with a letterboxed version of your sequence. The bad thing about HDV-SD is you will have to render the entire timeline and this could take a while. I will have an article about this on my site in a week or two.
4) Use compressor and QMaster to render out certain bits of your sequence to QT. I would suggest using the H.264 compressor because it produces a great image. The drawback is PC users won't be able to see H.264 until QT7 is available for the platform.
5) wait until HDVD comes out and re-export your HD sequence for that format.

Hope that answers your questions

Cheers
Stephen Schleicher
www.stephenschleicher.com