Progressive and interlaced movies together on one DVD

[Scott Shuster]

Graeme mentioned the other day that “there are plenty of ‘mixed’ interlaced and progressive DVDs out there” — well that’s just what I want to find out more about.

Let’s say we have some Sony HDV footage in 1080i, and some JVC HDV footage in 720p , and we are creating a commercial DVD where we want both types of footage to appear, on different tracks (different menu items) of the DVD. Is this a problem, or is this easy?

We figure we can create a JVC progressive Final Cut Pro sequence and export that into DVD Studio Pro as progressive MPEG-2, standard definition and used that for most of the tracks of the DVD...and then also create a 1080i sequence, and similarly export that into DVD Studio pro as an interlaced MPEG-2 standard definition — and put that in it’s own separate track in the DVD Studio Pro Project — and compile that into a DVD.

But we’re not sure. Is there something special we need to know to make this work? Some special settings in FCP or Studio Pro?

Will DVD Studio Pro accept this differing output in a a single project? We haven’t tried it yet and we’re hoping someone here has the answer at hand.

We also want to be certain that that DVD will play normally in the homes of the people who buy it.

and one other thing: We wonder if it would it be better to deinterlace the Sony 1080i footage and place it into the JVC 720p sequence (?-possible?), and export it with the rest of the JVC footage as a progressive MPEG-2 (SD) into DVD Studio Pro, NTSC...? Would that be a better approach...?