I'm afraid it's neither simple nor complete. It's a work in progress, and Avisynth is a command line tool, which makes many people uncomfortable.

Care to upload an original clip to a fileshare (NOT Youtube) and let us look at it??

"until I watched it on my HD TV

You are taking HD 60p source, downscaling to SD, and then using hardware uprez to bring it back to HD for viewing?

Happy to discuss intermediate solutions with you, but this now seems to be a different topic.

Here is a sample clip from my HF G30 shot at 1080-60p: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39278380/HD-DVD/MVI_0002.MP4

Here is the rendered clip out of VP13 to NTSC DVD:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39278380/HD-DVD/1080-60p.mpg

And this is the same clip frameserved to Handbrake, brought back into VP13 and then rendered to NTSC DVD with the same template:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39278380/HD-DVD/1080-60p%28HB%29.mpg

Let me know which one you like better.

Oldsmoke,

The handbrake one looks better. But these are MP4,s nor DVD files.

DaveT2

No, they are mpg files as they come out of Vegas when rendered using a NTSC DVD template and are ready to go onto a DVD via DVDA, just no audio.

The only MP4 file is the original HD 1080 60p file.

Sorry, you are correct. For some reason they opened in QT.

Now if I could only get people to use Blu-ray then all of this would no longer matter.

Rant=On

The industry has made a complete mess of this! First the ridiculous format war which went far too long and too many commercial releases of videos on SD DVD instead of Blu-Ray. There is no real incentive for people to change their ways unless they actually have experienced the beautiful quality of Blu-Ray videos.

And then there is cable and satellite. All of those SD channels with an overpriced premium for HD channels. All of that on top of too high a price in the first place. Not much incentive for people to finally move exclusively to HD and Blu-Ray. Even Netflix wants too much extra for Blu-Ray.

Then there is the extreme ignorance! I know a person who bought a nice big 62” television. The person has it connected to the cable box using an SD composite connection. To add insult to injury, the person has a combo SD DVD-VHS player for viewing movies. And they use VHS on that nice big TV? It is no surprise to me they complain that the picture quality is no better than what they had on their old SD CRT TV.

I told the person how to connect it properly but I doubt that ever got done.

And so now the industry is promoting and selling 4k? SO WHAT!!! What is the point when so many people out there are still stuck in 720x480 SD land?

Sometimes I feel like forgetting about dealing with all of this and just let them have the crap of a down converted video as punishment for their s-t-u-p-i-d-i-t-y! It is giving me a stress headache trying to deal with this thing.

Ok, Grrrrrr, Rant=off

Of course they have to promote 4K, especially after the massive success of getting everyone to buy a 3D TV.

It is almost worth the airfare to NAB to see what technology those marketing giants will push next year.

I heard all this wailing and gnashing of teeth when HD first came out a decade ago. Perhaps 4k isn't ready for the masses yet, but it will be the standard in maybe five years just like HD became today's standard.

We've already had lots of 4K discussions. The one recurring theme, which I agree with, is that 4K is not likely to make very fast inroads into the consumer display market, for two reasons:

1. You can't see much difference on displays of 55" or less, and most people don't have rooms that will easily accommodate displays which are significantly larger than this.

2. The 4K delivery technology is WAY behind where HD delivery technology was eight years ago. And even after eight years, as I showed, with actual data in a thread a few weeks ago, Blu-Ray is still being outsold 2:1 by DVD (as of June 2014). Given that, I don't see how 4K is going to penetrate the consumer market more quickly. I therefore wouldn't be surprised that 10 years from now, if I'm still around, 4K will only make up a small fraction of the USA video display market.

The streaming of HD quality video has become common, but is hitting some snags as providers throttle some user's bandwidth. I don't know what percentage of US households have fast enough Internet to stream HD, but I know for sure that almost no one in this country can stream 4K as of September 2014.

I don't see much hope that we will see delivery of 4K via a round shiny object. It is still going to be a few more years before thumb drives get cheap enough to be considered as a delivery mechanism.

I have a next-door neighbor who bought a 4K set 15 months ago and has yet to watch a single 4K video, other than what was built into the set. I tried to download a few 4K YouTube videos for them, but they were never able to get them to play.

However, while I see a very slow, soft consumer market for 4K displays and content, 4K as a capture medium is an entirely different matter, and for those who don't mind the workstation cost, and the extra time, this is clearly the way to go if you are truly a pro.

I took the HF G30 1080-60p source video and rendered (no-resample) at 21.9 mbps using the Sony AVC/MVC 1080-60i Blu-ray render template.

I created a Blu-ray project in DVD Architect 5.2 and added the HD material and both the DVD video files that Old Smoke uploaded. I set up the navigation so the HD video played first then linked to the Vegas rendered DVD video, then to the Handbrake rendered DVD video. I can upload the ISO if anyone wants to see it.

I watched the Blu-ray on a Sony BDP-S790 Blu-ray player through a Sony XBR49X850B 4K TV.

My considered opinion:

I can see the difference between the two standard definition videos, but I don't care. I've actually come to the same conclusion every time I've tried a new method of making a better DVD in the past. I'll watch the HD version.

Can you post screenshots, jd?

@John
I can see the difference between the two standard definition videos, but I don't care

Then you have missed the point. This workflow is for those that HAVE to deliver SD from HD.

Screenshots:

HD

Vegas Only

Vegas plus Handbrake

Most of the difference I see is dynamic, these screenshots probably won't expose the "squirming" in the trees.

@ Old Smoke

I don't want to seem insensitive to the objective.

I think these discussions fail to account for shooting progressive vs shooting interlaced.

I believe the OP shoots in progressive (1080p). Lots of Panasonic and Canon cams shoot natively in progressive. I have a Canon that does that. But my EX1 is capable of both and I always choose interlaced to shoot all my stage productions.

Why?

Because the light gathering ability of interlaced shooting is far greater than that of progressive.

So comparing workflows and results of the various HD to SD methods should distinguish between the two, no?

John

I just did a project with a mix of progressive and interlaced videos and the final results are excellent.

This workflow, while not perfect, gets me what I want for the videos I create especially those problem theater videos with the extremely bright and then very dark scenes.

As the subject says, "From Vegas to DVD - Another Way." And that is what this is, another way to get the best video quality as possible.

I wish I knew how to do the Vegas to another instance of Vegas procedure but so far the 'foggy' instructions on how to do so keep from achieving that elusive goal.

So I will stick with this for now.

"-- If the footage is interlaced, a project deinterlace method must be chosen. It's fine to leave it at interpolate all the time."

While I cannot comment on the latter (other than I always set it to Best, even if my deinterlace method is None :) - I don't quite get the former statement. We're talking about downrezzing from HD to DVD while rendering in Vegas using one of DVDA templates, right? So - unless the template is that for 24p - the remaining formats are 25i or 30i - why the heck should I be deinterlacing for DVDA?

Most of my materials are "progressive" 25p, but this really if PsF and as such, goes direct to DVD as 25i. So again - what is the point of having Vegas project settings deinterlace?

In my experience, the best way of getting rid of aliasing is Bob's suggested method to introduce an ever so slight amount of Gaussian blur.

Piotr

"In my experience, the best way of getting rid of aliasing is Bob's suggested method to introduce an ever so slight amount of Gaussian blur."

I've also had success removing aliasing by applying Motion Blur to the Video Bus Track. Depending on the image 5 to 10 frames of blur has worked well.

So - unless the template is that for 24p - the remaining formats are 25i or 30i - why the heck should I be deinterlacing for DVDA?Because it is mandatory to deinterlace interlaced footage when re-sizing to a different size during rendering. Not doing this will produce horrible results. This is true even when the end result of the render will also be interlaced.

Vegas should handle this for you automatically, and it sure as heck should not give you a confusing option in the Project Settings that will affect the quality of interlaced rendnering. Like you, most people think, "I'm going from interlaced, to interlaced, so why would I need to de-interlace??

In addition, most of the other settings in the Project Settings dialog do not affect rendering (unless you render to Uncompressed or use the Debugmode Frameserver), but the Deinterlace setting does affect the render.

Why is deinterlacing required when going from interlaced footage to interlaced footage, like what you do when creating a DVD? Because the two fields in an interlaced frame are from different points in time, and if the software uses the whole frame (i.e., both fields together) when changing the resolution, it will make very, very wrong decisions on where each pixel should go.

The alternative to deinterlacing is to resize the odd fields and resize the even fields as separate operations, and then weave the results of these two operations back together. This avoids the unbelievably bad artifacts which can result from resizing the entire frame at once, but yields a very innacurate estimation of where each pixel should be placed because the software is dealing with half the resolution and half the temporal information when placing each pixel into the new, re-sized video.

So, like the whole 0-255 issue that is once again being discussed for the millionth time, this is one of those "why does Vegas let you do the wrong thing?" discussions that keeps coming up.

I hate to think of how much lousy video has been created in Vegas because of the really bad decisions the engineers made -- and then never corrected -- about how the user is asked to interact with features that control the quality of re-sizing interlaced video.

"So - unless the template is that for 24p - the remaining formats are 25i or 30i - why the heck should I be deinterlacing for DVDA?
Because it is mandatory to deinterlace "

Absolutely agree with you, John - but you must have missed my statement that 99% of the footage I edit is progressive. Recently I got interlaced sources for one of my latest DVDs, and indeed I had to deinterlace it before downrezzing.

Piotr

PS. Oh, and I actually sell my music DVDs, John, so no horrible results of the sort you mention can exist :)

but you must have missed my statement that 99% of the footage I edit is progressive. Yes, I definitely did not understand correctly. When I saw your reference to 25i and 30i I thought you were using the same settings for those formats. Sorry about the unnecessary "lecture."

The topic has migrated from resizing to deinterlacing.
For that, I definitely recommend Handbrake, or one of the concoctions available in Avisynth.
Usually done in concert with downsizing (for HD to SD), the results are dramatically different than Vegas.

Bear in mind that "deinterlacing" can be used in two senses:

1. To make a DVD as per the original topic.
The video is temporarily deinterlaced into double frame rate progressive prior to resizing. The full frame need not be created, it could be left as half height. Each frame (half or full height) is then interpolated to resize to the new resolution. The double rate is then re-interlaced back to single frame rate.

2. To view interlaced video on a progressive screen.
Convert say 25 frames per second interlaced (50 fields per second) which purists call 25i and which is most often called 50i (Vegas uses both conventions!) into 25 frames per second progressive (25p). The dumb way is to discard the second field and interpolate the first field to full frame. For still or litttle movement for part or the whole of the image, the image will be blurred compared to the original. The smart way therefore makes use of the second field and removes interlacing artifacts as best it can.