From everyone's experience what is the best method ?

What gives the best results ?

Use PP or AE ?

Or indeed is there a 3rd party ap that works with CFHD files that works beter than the above ?

From both my own experience and others' on this and other forums, some third party softwares work much better than PremPro (I have not tested AE so can't comment on that, but from what I read it seems to be somewhere inbetween). Personally I achieved the highest quality resizing in VirtualDub to uncompressed, and frame serving from VirtualDub to Sorenson Squeeze. Try a search on this forum for more specifics, comparisons.

You need to divide the question up. What provides the better scaling? And what does the better SD encoding? If the something that could be enhanced with the scaling let CineForm know, if it is the encoding for distribution let Adobe know.

There is a problem in Premiere Pro 2.0 that should be fixed in CS3. Until then, export a Cineform HD AVI, import it into a standard definition project, scale it down and export.

With CS3 you will just export.

There is a problem in Premiere Pro 2.0 that should be fixed in CS3. Until then, export a Cineform HD AVI, import it into a standard definition project, scale it down and export.

With CS3 you will just export.


Steven is right, as usual. Using HDLink on the same Cineform HD AVI also works and involves fewer steps. If your final output is DVD, I suspect the burner will have more to do with quality than the scale down to SD -- PPro 2 takes forever for a two-pass DVD encode.