OK, maybe I'm just being picky, but I didn't notice as many motion/compression artifacts with DV as with HDV.

A shot of 100s of people milling around in a gynasium from above was always iffy, but now a shot of two or three dancers in front of black is iffy. Should I just accept that, or should I be trying to fix something?

Right now: Canon A1 -> HDVSplit (laptop) -> Premiere Pro II (desktop) -> Encore 2 -> Consumer DVD player (LG) -> old (5 yrs) Tinitron monitor. I see occaisional judder and motion/compression artifacts that I didn't used to see. (I've tried different monitors and players. - Split reports no lost frames - no tape used.)

Anybody with a rule of thumb about "just-don't-try-it"s? Does using an intermediate codec help with this or does the problem start with camera compression? (I might have seen problems on the capture monitor but then capture monitors always seem a little strange to me.)

I know there are way too many variables for a difinitive answer, but have others noticed these things and come up with any "works-for-me" type solutions?

Or... should I just accept that that's HDV?

Or... should I just accept that that's HDV?

Most likely - HDV has to compress the video significantly more than SD DV.

Having said that, you are viewing the final results in SD, so, at some point in your work flow, presumably you are converting from one MPEG2 format to another. Are things like the size of the GOP the same?

Also, is your target delivery SD or HD?

Are things like the size of the GOP the same?

Also, is your target delivery SD or HD?

Hmmm. I'll check on the GOPs. Target is SD for now.

Other then at work (which supplied a camera) I am never going to shoot on the HDV format. I have had sooooooooo many problems with the format that I have basically sworn it off all together. Because of the MPEG 2 compression any major movement will seriously mess up the video. So far the only HD format I like is HDCAM SR.

My at home workflow is to shoot on my XL2, edit, burn and play back in SD. Until HD is perfected I will be shooting SD.

The Adobe software will not give you the best results, one of the main problems is the resizing process.

Have you seen this thread? http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=70792&highlight=virtualdub