Here's my deal. I am going through a 12 week Firefighter Training course at the academy in College Station, Texas. Since I am the only photographer in the class, I was "chosen" to put together a video to show at our graduation. I am also being asked to put the video on dvd's for each of the students and chiefs.

I have a 5dmk2 and have taken both pics and videos. I bought a training dvd on using Premiere cs3 and have done my best to put together a video. I put the video together in HD since the video from my 5d is HD. I have tested a few times, exporting the video into encore to build a dvd. it has gone okay, but whatever i try, the video gets the sides cut off when played on the tv (plays fine on a computer). the quality is also degraded quite a bit from the down conversion from HD to SD.

I am hoping someone would be willing to lend an hour or so, to help me make this a decent video i can share with our families and guests at our graduation. If you are in or near the College Station or Houston, Texas area, and would be willing to lend me a hand, please send me a pm or e-mail me at justin'at'justinunderwater'dot'com

I would be willing to give you.... how about four 8x12 or two 12x18 prints of your choice from my website Home Page (http://www.justinunderwater.com) for your help.

Thanks!



and here's the good bunch of guys you would be making happy:

http://www.justinunderwater.com/gallery/albums/firedepartment/FinalSized.sized.jpg

First, I admire your career choice. I think it's a selfless choice that you should be proud of. Just be careful and stay safe out there.

You have to understand that you're going to sacrifice quality when you down-res from HD to SD. You'll end up with about a quarter of the original resolution so it won't look anywhere nearly as good. As an aside, you want to pick your transcode settings in the Adobe Media Encoder carefully. I haven't used AME in about a year so I'm not fresh on what they are. Here are a couple of things to consider:
- Make the output field setting "Progressive". It's going to deinterlace the HD anyway.
- Use a high bit rate. Anything over 5kbps is best.
- If your video is short (<90 min), use a 5kbps bit rate or higher that will fit on disk
- Some, myself included, consider AME a mediocre transcoder so that can't help.

As to the issue where the video gets cut off on the sides when playing from DVD. That may just be an issue with your player. You have to tell your DVD player what kind of TV you have. There should be a setting somewhere in the player's setup screen. If your TV is not widescreen but your player thinks it is, it will do exactly what you've experienced. I'm nearly certain this is the issue.

thanks for the suggestions. ill give them a try. im actually going to be playing the video at the graduation ceremony on the schools dvd player which is hooked up to their projector, so i doubt they will let me mess with the settings, but we'll see. thanks again.