I couldn't really find anything in a search on this...

With the XL2, is it advisable to capture at 960 x 480 with square pixels or 720 x 480 in 16:9? As my eventual output is dvd, I would imagine that 720 x 480 is fine, but I wanted to know if there's any more quality in 960 x 480 before rendering that carrys over to the lower res output.

Hi Justin,
Just use 720x480; that is the pixel count for both DV and DVD. The XL2 CCD has more pixels than that, but the image is processed down in-camera to standard DV at 720x480 using either a 0.9 pixel aspect ratio (for narrow screen) or a 1.2 pixel aspect ratio (for wide screen). Pretty much any editing program is going to have presets for those.

About the only reason to use a higher pixel count is if you happen to be using a specialty capture card -- not a standard firewire port -- that outputs square-pixel files to your editing system, like the old Canopus DV Raptor that I used to use. Premiere had a Canopus preset for widescreen at 853x480, giving a square pixel 16:9 image.

But 720x480 is all you need to edit XL2 images in most any editor via firewire.

Excellent, just what I was looking for!

Thanks for the very quick reply!