What the best setting for 1080i 24f footage??

James: Exporting to what. What is your end product ?

I'm just looking for people's preferred choices. Also what might be the best SD dvd encoding option as well. thanks.

Well .... the "best" would be uncompressed. But you won't be able to play it on anything. Like Chris said - what do you want to do with the output file?

I guess maybe go back to the mpeg2 file but I'm also looking for the best SD dvd encoding format.

I suggest Windows Media scaled down to 1280X720 so that it fits on most PC screens.

As for SD, I usually import my HDV project into a SD project, scale it down and export to MPEG2-DVD.

Steven, what is the advantage of creating a second project, rather than just exporting directly to MPEG-2 from the HDV project?

Also, if you recommend exporting to 720p, should I check on the "de-interlace" feature.


Sorry, one more question. If I'm exporting back to tape only, should I stay in my HDV project and export to tape that way? Or is it better to export to AVI and encode it again using an external MPEG-2 encoder (or bringing it into Sony Vegas or something).

Because I heard that the rendering engine in Premiere Pro 2.0 for MPEG-2 isn't so great. I wonder whether the loss in quality would be that noticeable to me.

Craig,

I don't know why, but it seems that Adobe doesn't scale HDV down as well in the Adobe Media Encoder as it does in a project using the scaling parameter of the Motion effect. It is a slight difference, but it is there.

Also, the advantage of scaling in the new project is that you can choose the best part of the larger frame to use. Most people will scale it all down to the same percentage but I prefer to place the best part of each frame in the shot. Sometimes I shoot a little wider than necessary, and this way I can zoom in a bit more or less to get exactly the right frame.

The Adobe Media encoder works fine. It is just going to SD from a HDV project that seems weak to me.

I always deinterlace, because either I am showing my material on a PC, or on a HDTV using the AVeL Linkplayer. Once I star using Blu-Ray that may change. I don't know for sure.

To go back to tape, just use the original project.