The story so far:
- I have a resurfaced (old) project shot in HDV 1440×1080 i50, Video Levels 16-255.
- This has been edited in Sony Vegas 10, as a project consistent with the footage (hence HDV), but with Audio 44kHz (due to predominantly CD music background), and with levels over full-range 0-255.
- My first attempt involved (from Vegas 10) rendering down to SD, encoded in GoPro-Cineform. This I imported to Adobe Encore and generated a DVD which looked acceptable.
- In retrospect, I discovered that I had enabled Vegas’s renderer’s “Stretch Video / Don’t Letterbox” option. Ideally I’d have wanted it to be cropped (top and bottom) to fill. I am less familiar than I would like with Vegas-10’s nuances in this respect..
- Subsequently I experimented with the AviSynth’s-HD2SD approach, which prior to Adobe CS5 was claimed by others to give superior results to scaling within Premiere etc. However:
- It has since been observed by some that Adobe CS6’s new CUDA-based scaling algorithms are almost as good.
- In my own experiments with using HD2SD on my current (old) project’s HDV-to-SD requirement, I found HD2SD’s results inferior to (e.g. more blurred than) Sony Vegas’s “Best” (Bicubic) scaling processes, which I believe/assume to happen equivalently both in-project and on-render.
Links:
- http://lacolorpros.com/blog/?10176-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-and-Encore-Outputing-DVD-and-BluRay-Workflow
Adobe Premiere Pro and Encore Outputing DVD and BluRay Workflow (2011-08-16)- This goes beyond simply scaling etc., e.g. its Workflow” encompasses use of multiple computers for “eager” parallel encoding operations.