All DVDs are SD interlaced max. You'll often see 24p with pulldown added, which might look better on some progressive screens, but you might also loose some smoothness -- matter of your personal preference IMHO.

Far as re-sizing goes, HD can make for really nice SD video, but only if/when the SD video is less than perfect. IOW, it depends on how good your source is, so try shooting different formats & compare the results.

Larger frames contain more data -- down-sizing tosses some of that out, interpolating & losing some quality, but the smaller frame will have little distortion, artifacts etc as any *bad* pixels are overwhelmed by all the *good* ones. OTOH if the SD video is good enough, that quality loss makes the results look worse in comparison.

Related to all of this. I have a DV file captured from AVS capture.... not Sony capture. What is the fastest way to produce a DVD from this format? It appears to be the same as the sony capture .avi.

I have tried capturing in mpeg2 but the quality is not good and I get a silly thick black bar around the final file output from the AVS software.

I just want to capture video and burn a DVD of the content in the least amount of time. Does any one have speed test using different setting and formats to meet Guinness world of record for the fastest DVD burn in history?

I have an i7 machine with a 22x burner. I can get a 3 min video to prepare and burn in 2 min 27 secs. A world record?

"I have an i7 machine with a 22x burner. I can get a 3 min video to prepare and burn in 2 min 27 secs. A world record?"

Nope. Somebody with a name very similar to yours claims to do it in 2min 15sec.

Whoopee.

>"I have a DV file captured from AVS capture....What is the fastest way to produce
> a DVD from this format?"
>"I have tried capturing in mpeg2 but the quality is not good and I get a silly thick
> black bar around the final file output from the AVS software"

Not familiar with AVS Capture, but assuming you're capturing & not transferring DV format files via firewire, one step you might look at is your capture codec. UT is supposed to be very fast on i7s, which could speed up your encode to mpg2. Or, while you didn't have great results, all mpg2 encoders are not equal -- some are fast, yet have very good quality, & you could skip the re-encode entirely. For mpg2 encoding from something like DV or mjpg avi, while quality **might** take a hit, ATI graphics cards have their stream tech, while nvidea has Cuda -- encoding DVD-spec mpg2 to 320 X 240 wmv I've hit near 800 fps encoding using ATI's stream. Or if you want to really minimize the time from camera or source to DVD, record directly to the DVD while capturing, same as a stand-a-lone DVDR.

Thanks for the post. All good info. Question. You said record direct to DVD on the computer. Is that possible with Sony Architect? I have tried a "Dazzle" encoder which is an external device but it seemed a bit thin in quality and, while I can't prove it, I don't know that it provides the highest in quality. I am capturing from a Sony Z1 camera with firewire. So what do I need to record direct to disk. I imagine that I still have to finalize the disk and write it out. That is what takes considerable time.

>"I am capturing from a Sony Z1 camera with firewire"

When you shoot your video it's recorded in-camera as digital files already, so you just transfer what's already there to your PC. That gives you the highest quality, & from those files you have to re-encode to DVD-spec mpg2. A lot of software companies, including Sony, refer to it as capturing video, which is technically misleading... Capturing video was around long before DV/HDV & other digital camera formats, is done by hardware like your Dazzle, & originally means taking analog video/audio streams, digitizing them, encoding the results, & writing that to your storage media.

For quality & speed with such short files I think you're probably doing the best using your DV format files [that you transferred or copied from your camera] in DVDA -- using another encoder to re-encode DV to mpg2 useing Cuda (for nvidia cards), or something like A's Video Converter (for ATI cards) would be faster, but the time it takes you to set the audio/video file to use in the encoder could take up more than the time you save with faster encoding. For longer/larger files it can be worth it -- with FireFox & everything else still running I did a very quick comparison, encoding a 5 min mjpeg with wav audio avi file to DVD spec mpg2 with mpg audio (faster than ac3 encoding)... in XP Pro SP3 32 at the moment, Vegas 9C took 2 min. 27 sec -- ATI's CCC converter took 1 min. 13 sec. Vegas & DVDA have the same encoder, but using Vegas I could time just the encoding.

Traditional capture, converting analog audio/video streams from your camera will be lower quality, because the video's going through more changes, but how much quality you lose depends on what you use to capture or digitize it. If you're concerned with getting video from your camera on DVD ASAP it might be good enough? I was anything but impressed in my experience with a Dazzle device [it was a cheaper model bundled with some Roxio software I picked up a few years back] -- that more or less toy compared to good capture hardware was like comparing your camera to something in the $100 range, & the driver software limited the encoding quality considerably.

Capturing [digitizing analog video] direct to DVD AFAIK normally uses the DVD + or - VR format [there may be exceptions]. Software works the same as stand-a-lone DVD Recorders, & the discs from those at least are playable in most all players/drives. From the little I remember trying it a few times years ago, when using your PC & software you might not have to go through the finalization in order to get a playable disc, but I could be wrong -- I do know using +RW discs works much better -- never tried DVD RAM discs. The app I tried was Nero Vision, so you could download their trial & see if it suited you, maybe using your Dazzle just as a proof of concept before you looked at better devices/hardware?