I disagree. Component might be analog but it is of a very high quality 1920 x 1080 just because its analog doesn't make it bad.

I have not tried that, but, to me, logically, it would affect the quality of the picture in SOME way. I don't feel it would be a GOOD way. If just for an effect, I bet it could be recreated with plugins instead of going to all the extra work.

musicvid did not say analog is bad. He said there would be a useless d>a>d conversion.
At theoretical best, there would be no improvement. DVD is standard definition. There's no getting around that.

"Component might be analog but it is of a very high quality 1920 x 1080 just because its analog doesn't make it bad."

An analog downconversion to Standard Definition makes no logical sense whatsoever. D->D downconversion is already available in many forms, unless you favor the "warmth" of analog video, along with your cassette recordings.

Let's step back a bit... What kind of problem are you having making a good looking DVD from HD material? I do it all the time in software and have no complaints whatsoever.

1080 downcoversion to SD NTSC involves an 85% loss of data. It's fifth grade math.
An intermediate analog conversion can not escape that, but it can make it worse.

Good luck on finding a DVD recorder with component in connectors.

As everyone points the useless d-a-d conversion.....
I can record hi quality component to an ingest in a very high-end and very expensive server running capture software to an uncompressed .avi container....but I ask for very hi quality signal to begin with to get anything decent on the recorded side. Otherwise the capture is pretty much a joke.

You can do even as... taking an SVHS output to a DV device then capture via firewire and do as well.

This is not as silly an idea as everyone seems to think.
Back in the heyday of DV Avid recommended capturing via component rather than firewire. We used to make good money renting out DV decks with component outputs but I thought that it a crazy idea when I first heard of it but it did look better, more like BetaSP than DV.

Why it works is due to low pass filtering and chroma smoothing. Vegas lacks a video low pass filter. Personally I'm pretty happy with the results I can get just using Vegas but I'm delivering 720x576, if anyone has the gear to try it, it's worth a test.

Bob.

personally, "software" will always beat "hardware", cause hardware, which also uses a internal software, have limitations, and don't evolve as fast as software.

you can achieve the effect you want in software, just need the correct tools and the proper way ;)

i have a very strong opinion about "looks better" mindset. its just unusable. all the time, there always someone saying "this method looks better", even if it don't. that's why i use "mathematical" comparisons, or "enhanced visual difference" comparison, to avoid "this looks better to me"

low pass, smoothing, vertical filtering, proper downsizing of interlaced video, etc, all can be done in avisynth by example. no need to involve analog in it.

"personally, "software" will always beat "hardware", cause hardware, which also uses a internal software, have limitations, and don't evolve as fast as software."

Not entirely true. Some hardware has embedded proprietary software which is difficult to emulate but can be updated quickly. It'll also be faster and more power efficient that running code in a general purpose CPU.

'i have a very strong opinion about "looks better" mindset. its just unusable. all the time, there always someone saying "this method looks better", even if it don't. that's why i use "mathematical" comparisons, or "enhanced visual difference" comparison, to avoid "this looks better to me" "

That I entirely agree with although it's not always easy to devise tests that emulate what the human eye sees, some caution needed.

"low pass, smoothing, vertical filtering, proper downsizing of interlaced video, etc, all can be done in avisynth by example"

Indeed however not everyone here is capable of going down that road.

"no need to involve analog in it. "

If it gets a group of people the outcome they want using a technique they're comfortable with I fail to see the objection.
One thing I've learned in this game, there's oftenly not immediately obvious reasons why something gets done a less than ideal way. Telling people they're wrong doing it the way they are isn't always going to be a good career move.

Bob.

thinking again, you are correctly about hardware/software. i remember, for instance, DCDi by Faroudja, was an amazing hardware deinterlacer, and no comparable software existed for a long time. but now, we have better than this one.

of course, when i say better, i didn't mean faster, or more practical. i just mean better quality. like a noise reduction for example, most TVs have it, but its an ultra-ugly 3d noise reduction. its easy to say neatvideo is decades ahead, but a TV can't have a so computing-intensive software in their hardware... for now...

with today's processing software, i cant recall something that i wanted to do but find no tool for it. avisynth alone is just amazingly powerful for process every single need. and as we don't need realtime processing, we can choose quality over speed.

about telling people their method is "wrong", you are absolute true. i recall some people in the Brazilian forum i participate a lot, they convert to dvd using a constant bitrate at 9800mbps (independent of the video duration), and after done, they reduced the size in dvdshrink.

telling them to reduce interlaced bitrate via requantization is bad idea, its great if the reduction is 5 to 10% max, after that, recompress is always better. even the software developer said, but it was just waste of time. they said the quality was better than converting the video to the desired bitrate directly, and nothing would change their minds. i tested myself, the quality was horrible (they sometimes reduce the bitrate to about 50% of the original bitrate)

now most of the time i only discuss technical stuff, not personal. you like a handheld camera? i like shoulder ones. you like the clean image of AVCHD? i hate it ;p

"now most of the time i only discuss technical stuff, not personal. you like a handheld camera? i like shoulder ones. you like the clean image of AVCHD? i hate it ;p "

I'm a shoulder man myself, I just wish I can afford a 2/3" shoulder camera and a really good lens. I never will but I'm pretty happy with my EX1 and I've found a way to jam it against my shoulder so I can shoot off sticks and not wobble too much but only if I really, really, have to.

AVCHD, yeah, not a great fan of it but no great passion either way unlike cameras and ergonomics.

Bob.

Some of you thought my idea was crazy we'll I found this guy that is having the same problems down converting with software the only difference is he is using FCP or Compressor. Read his fix here.

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1063466

I guess the bottom line is you need to filter out the high frequencies then add sharpness before rendering out to mainconcept mpg2.

Jerry K

Doing that down convert works pretty well. I haven't done BD to DVD that way, but here's what I've done before:
*Use the downconvert option on my camera & replace the HDV footage with DV footage in my project (only ever did once, I, like John, get no complaints with my HDV to DVD's)
*Use the analog video out on my GPU to hook up to the in's on a Sony DV VCR with a miniDV tape in it. It worked GREAT, solved all my potential interlace issues, played back completely smooth 29.97fps, gave me an easy to ingest.
*Hook my higher res source up to my old ADS Pyro.

If you can playback your your HD to a SD device in real time you can eliminate rendering times and have a cleaner SD file w/o most issues associated with down-converting via software (interlace being the biggest imho).