DVD Authoring: Progressive v. Interlaced
 

I'm working on a DVD project that will be distributed to around 100 people. Based on a lot of reading here (and other forums) and hours of trial and error I've ended up with the following HDV to DVD workflow:

- Recorded with HC1 in HDV (m2t) straight to hard drive using HDVSplit (with tapes as back up)
- Batch render to Cineform intermediate (1080-60i)
- Slice and dice in Vegas using HDV 1080-60i project
- Render to DVDA MPEG2 Widescreen with the following properties:
Project Properties:
* Template: HDV 1080-60i
* Field Order: None (Progressive)
* Render Quality: Best
* Motion Blur: Gaussian
* Deinterlace: Interpolate
Track Properties:
* Smart Resample
* Reduce Interlace Flicker: NO
Render Properties:
* MainConcept MPEG-2
* DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen
* Quality: Best
* Field Order: Progressive Only
* Video Quality: High (31)
* Constant Bit Rate - 8,600,000
* Stretch video to fit output frame size: yes

Rendering with these settings takes 4.5 hours for a 1 hour video. Using DVD Architect, I compile a DVD in about 4 minutes - DVD Architect does NOT re-render the video and is apparently ok going to DVD w/ progressive instead of interlaced. The resulting DVD is fantastic - great picture quality, no interlace artifacts (testing on 52" CRT rear projection HDTV). The DVD plays fine on both of my Sony DVD players, one progressive, the other not.

So, here's my question. Is progressive MPEG-2 part of the DVD spec and will my disc play on ALL DVD players without issue?

As an alternative I could change the settings to output an interlaced DVD by changing the following:
Project - Field Order: Upper, Deinterlace: None
Track - Reduce Interlace Flicker: YES
Render - Field Order: Lower (or upper?)

With these changes the render time increases to 12+ hours. So is it absolutely necessary to create a DVD with interlaced video, or are there commercial DVD's out there with progressive video. In other words, can I safely distribute my project rendering as described above?

Thanks in advance...

Ron

The majority of commercially released DVDs are progressive scan. They'll become interlaced or not, at the display device/source, depending on what it is.

Thanks for the settings - I am going to try this too. Now, can you from the 1080i HDV Timelline - print to HDV Tape to make a copy of the editied project in HDV? Or will it now work with the progressive setting? I am wondering if going to PRINT TO HDV TAPE will automatically change the setting to interlace given the HC3 1080i format.

The nice part about doing this is that you can elect to save a newly created M2T file of the HD project that you can print to HDV at any time in the future in case your tape goes bad - plus you have the version in DVD format too.

Cool this is very useful information. I gonna try this out. Finally some answers...thanks for sharing.

Ron:

I take it that the reason you capture with HDVSplit, rather than directly with Cineforms Capture utility is that you are looking for scene detect. Otherwise, if scene detect was available, would you just capture in Cineform ? Or is there some other reason for that step ?

I assume you're asking why I'm not using ConnectHD, and the answer would be very simple - I don't have it. For this particular project (my daughter's dance recital), I recorded both to tape and directly to hard drive live. In other words, I had a laptop at the event and a USB external drive. The camera was connected to the laptop via FireWire and I used HDVSplit to record directly to the external drive. Since I was recording live, scene detect was obviously not a factor. I used HDVSplit simply because it was a means to record live directly to the hard drive without having to install any bulky video software on the laptop. After the event I connected the external drive to my desktop and batch converted the m2t files to Cineform intermediate 1080-60i using Vegas (I let it run overnight).

I'm considering ConnectHD, but haven't found a compelling reason to spend the $200 yet.

Okay, now I understand. On someone's suggestion the other day I tested HDV Split with my laptop and a USB drive, and it worked great...

Exactly - once I've finished editing the project I'll render the DVD master, but also print to tape in HD to preserve for future considerations (HD-DVD, B/R). I actually have the Avel LP2, so the HD output (abridged or split) will also be going on DVD-DL for HD home viewing. I love this stuff!!

Hey Ron, what are the general specs on your laptop?

The laptop is a Compaq Presario V2000:
- AMD Turion64 ML-32 (1.8GHz)
- 384MB RAM
- ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/productivity ports
- 80GB Hard Drive (4200RPM)

Not bleeding edge by any means, but it gets the job done and HDVSplit doesn't drop any frames recording to an external USB hard drive.

Thanks Ron.

Ron,

Thanks - I'll try those progressive settings.

I always thought: "if I'm shooting interlaced, and the target is DVD (where most of the DVD players/displays will be interlaced), then best to keep it interlaced".

But I've had very long render times when downrezzing to SD DVD... if I can cut this down to ~1/3 of the time (as your test shows), and the quality is good.....

Mark

Progressive works fine, but I can't see a difference
 

I tried Ron's settings. Normally my flow is similar, except I keep it interlaced.
On a 10 minute project: (Pentium M 1.6 laptop):

- Rendering to progressive (PAL SD DVD): 64 minutes
- Rendering to interlaced (PAL SD DVD): 91 minutes

So for me the progressive was faster, but not a factor of 3 faster like for Ron.

Both looked good - no noticable artifacts. Neither as good as the original HD of course. I couldn't tell the difference (on a 42" plasma screen).

So I guess I could go either way....