XAVC or XAVC-S are probably not your best choices if you're shooting HDV 60i, to my knowledge, neither of them support interlaced video. Of course, if you're shooting 30P or 24P then it's an OK choice except for the fact that XAVC and XAVC-S are basically h.264 and therefore requires some horsepower to play back.

Since you're doing several generations and you want smooth playback, in my opinion, your best choice is the Cineform codec. It's 4:2:2 10-bit and can be interlaced or progressive, it supports both.

Does the 1440 matter, at some point doesn't it have to be unsquished?

Bob.

I like MXF as it plays very nicely even on my underpowered system.

Mike

@bob - i suppose not, but most of my stuff goes out at 720 one way or another nowadays, web, intranet, usb stick, pc playback on unknown equipment, etc.,

@jc - i usually shoot 25i PAL. would prefer not to use a 3rd party codec, though i do have an old version of cineform i used before xdcam ex.

@mike - which variety of mxf?

@marco - i was very happy with xdcam ex, but then they removed smart render...

Leslie, I shoot in 60i so I use the HD EX 1920x1080-60i template. I've done some unscientific tests on my own and found no noticeable degradation even going down 4 or 5 generations with it.
Renders are either the same template for my local cable tv station, the Sony AVC Internet 1280x720-30p template for my YouTube renders or plain old SD for DVD.

Mike

Canopus HQ? i edit 1080i on a old pc. works great

In general, it's probably safe to say that any format using the MPEG-2 codec is going to be more machine-friendly than AVC/h264.

[I]"most of my stuff goes out at 720 one way or another nowadays, web, intranet, usb stick, pc playback on unknown equipment, etc.,"[/I]

Which is mostly square pixels.

Bob.

Any reason to not use the HDV codec? Most systems handle mpeg-2 pretty well and if it's the same compression as HDV then that's the best you're going to get I'm betting, unless you use uncompressed PNG.

HDV won't be quite as sharp as any format using 1920x1080. But for my purposes it's fine, since at the end I downshift to DVD (720x480) anyway.

"HDV won't be quite as sharp as any format using 1920x1080"

Going from HDV (1440x1080) to 1920x1080 should not make it worse in itself, and as Bob has pointed out it often has to be converted to square pixels anyhow. Everytime you do a lossy recode you will lose quality, of course.

With HDV I eventually converted from HDV 1440x1080 to XDCAM EX 1280x720. To my eye it was better then 1920x1080 and I even converted some footage and projects to 720-60p from HDV; especially when it contained fast motion. Vegas does a great job converting HDV 60i to 60p and form there I got great results for DVD and Web via Handbrake.

Just wanted to mention a couple of things:

XDcam .mp4 can do 1440x1080i at 25Mbps as an option and when it does it is the same video codec as HDV except that there is no data compression on the audio. You can even (or could at least could when XDcam mp4 smart-rendering was available) smart render between the two formats.

Back when XDcam more smart rendering was turned on, smart rendered parts of video looked the same between HDV and 1440x1080 XDcam, but rerender end parts looked noticeably better with the XDcam mp4 format. I don't know why.

HDV smart renders still do another generation of data compression on the audio. This is not a problem with XDcam formats.

XDcam mp4 renders can be don without including audio which is useful as a b-roll intermediate. It can also include mono audio. XDcam mxf must include at least stereo audio.

XDcam mxf has higher quality video and audio options available but must include at least stereo audio.

Handbrake and TMPGENC don't make proper sense of XDcam mxf audio and only let you choose one audio channel instead of a stereo pair. This is the only reason I don't use XDcam mxf as an intermediate for Handbrake.

"Handbrake and TMPGENC don't make proper sense of XDcam mxf audio and only let you choose one audio channel instead of a stereo pair."

Have you tried a Handbrake nightly release? They fixed a bunch of things in libav10.