Is The HF-G10 vs. Canon 60D

[Maurice Covington]

I can personally confirm that, in my conversation with Canon's technical support, the XA-10 and the HF-G10 don't have the same sensor. I actually have some footage from both cameras. Unfortunately, at the time,the conditions did not allow me to test in low light conditions typical of say a church. That being said, you can see it on Vinson. Just type in my name and it should come up.

Regarding the frame taken from the DVD; I am doin.g something seriously wrong. I export using H.264 and usually widescreen 1080i. I have never tweaked the other settings because I really don'tknow how they work. Any help and/or suggestions would be great.

[Joe Marler]

Originally Posted by Maurice Covington

...Regarding the frame taken from the DVD; I am doin.g something seriously wrong. I export using H.264 and usually widescreen 1080i. I have never tweaked the other settings because I really don'tknow how they work. Any help and/or suggestions would be great.

I'm not a codec expert, so I am partially speculating here...

I think video DVD uses MPEG-2. Whether explicitly or implicitly, a transcode to MPEG-2 at 720x480 must happen before burning. At each transcode stage there are bitrate and various quality options (some not obvious).

Therefore if you are transcoding from the camera's AVCHD to H.264, it is probably being transcoded again to MPEG-2 before burning, whether you see this or not. You might be losing quality at each stage, especially if the highest quality and bitrate settings are not used.

If your software allows burning in a more direct path without going to H.264, try that. If you must render to an output file first, then burn it, pick "MPEG-2 DVD" if that's available, and make sure the export settings are all at the highest quality and bitrate. Before burning, play the file and inspect the quality. Then burn that using your DVD authoring software.

I just exported the previous test video to what CS5 calls "MPEG-2 DVD" which is 720x480, 29.97 fps, at 9 mbps, using 2-pass bitrate encoding and max render quality. It looks about like the previously-posted DVD still frame.

[Maurice Covington]

Originally Posted by Joe Marler

If your software allows burning in a more direct path without going to H.264, try that. If you must render to an output file first, then burn it, pick "MPEG-2 DVD" if that's available, and make sure the export settings are all at the highest quality and bitrate. Before burning, play the file and inspect the quality. Then burn that using your DVD authoring software.

I tried using the MPEG-2 DVD setting in Adobe and it was a SUCCESS!!!! Thank you for the direction. I just feel bad for my past clients that got a quality less than what I was actually capable of delivering. I actually maxed out a lot of the settings that made sense in an effort to get the best results. I took about 25 minutes for a 40 second clip.

I was only using the H.264 because it was the only format that seemed to work well with IMovie and IDVD. Out with the old and in with the new!!

Thanks again.