Greetings Peers,

Just wondered if anyone here has any render settings that they live by for the best quality? I find myself, and I am sure many of you need to deliver to 845 by 480 or even 720 by 480 even though most of use are shooting at 1440 or higher due to our new cameras. And since many projects need many different resolutions at the end of the day, does anyone have a workflow they stick to when wanting to keep their project HD ready, but yet still have to deliver to SD.
I have read the manual for Sony Vegas and had read that if rendering out to a smaller resolution than your project properties it is wise to use the best setting for rendering to limit digital artifacts. Or do you just change your project properties before each render to depict which resolution your outputing for that render?

Thanks in advance for all thoughts on this...

Hi John

If you check out further back in this section you will find tons of discussion on HD to SD and lot's on controversy with it too.
Very quickly you need to use the correct project template for your HD footage. ie: If you are shooting interlaced then more than likely you will use the 1440x1080i template.

Also bear in mind that if your footage is interlaced, the field order of HD is Upper Field first and SD is Lower Field first so you need to also have de-interlace set in your project properties.

Then you can simply render to 720x480 MPEG2 for a standard DVD.

Now without getting too complex, you might also like to think about transcoding your footage from the camera straight to SD (that's what I do for weddings as all my clients want a "normal" DVD) The quality difference on an LCD TV between HD to SD and HD footage transcoded and edited in SD is really minimal (I can see the difference is places where I have comparison footage but I doubt whether anyone would be able to say "This is an SD clip"

Read all the previous discussions however and prepare to be totally confused!! I was!!

Chris