The wedding video market moved from SD shoots and DVD releases to HD shooting and Blu-ray releases about 5 years ago.
WHY?
Because Blu-ray is HD and DVD is not, Blu-ray is truly archival method, and it all looks great in glorious living color with stereo sound to cross any home media center.

Create a Blu-ray project and burn - then burn a DVD for the poor souls.

What video format did your camera shoot? Was it interlaced AVCHD?

"Blu-ray is truly archival method, and it all looks great in glorious living color with stereo sound"

In what way is BD archival and DVD not?

A BD looks great because it is HD. A DVD may also have living colour and stereo or even surround sound.

To the OP: you can also get a longer movie at top encoding quality on a standard BD compared to a standard DVD, but for good impact you should only present excerpts and key scenes or you will bore your viewers to death. Or you could make a full version for bride and groom and a highlight version that they can show family and friends.

Blu-ray spec competes in the archival arena in several ways - but the truly simple to understand spec over DVD is the coated surfacing tech that Blu-ray employs to give it wear and tear ability.

It's too bad the best quality isn't playable on average consumer systems.
The distribution model defines the deliverable quality, not the other way around.

much as i appreciate the quality of br over dvd, i have never been asked for br, nor have any clients EVER expressed any interest when i've offered, HOWEVER, every client nowadays wants a hd mp4 file.

Creating an MP4 computer file format is not the same nor should be compared to creating a Blu-ray disc with subtitles, menus, navigation into detail stories. These are very different opportunities for productions.

However, one thing is very clear the HD quality that can be mastered into an MP4 container can be good to stellar, hence it is a fine opportunity to release HD works.

Support for Blu-ray and MP4 as well as HD in general means that the tech has expanded far beyond what an ordinary DVD offers. So whether the consumer leads with demand for it over DVD is not really the concern. It is a fact, it is an opportunity, and it will not disappear becacuse of remaining DVD distribution.

I am reminded that once the invention of TV was out the door, radio became an opportunity of a different sort.

Peter, here is where my less than pro knowledge comes out. I don't know. We shot the wedding on my wife's new Nikon 3100 DSLR that does video, my old Mini DV camera and a canon hard disk video camera (that's not half bad). The worst of the cameras is the Mini DV. So I am sure I have a mess of competing video formats (maybe not).
In my jackleg way I just shoot, multi cam edit, render and the client smiles.

I suppose others answered my question by stating that the fact I am indeed limited to my clients playback method means I can render this in a format that works on DVD.

Dennis in Memphis

VegasPro is built well to mix formats on the timeline. How you do this is influenced by three factors 1) What you want the outcome to be 2)What version of VegasPro you are using, and 3) how do you see the artistic value in mixing formats -i.e, color matching, frame placement, etc.

Your outcome choice has a lot to do with the look, if you author in HD and deliver Blu-ray you get the best of everything.

If you clamp on settling DVD output - then you have a host of compromises in the VegasPro application. You can do it problematically. You can also choose production workflows that take you at some point outside the Vegas app for a little different control on outcome.

The way I see it, you're stuck with the lowest denominator - Mini DV, which is SD. Blowing that up to compete with the shots from your full HD camera on a BD will look awful. Go for DVD as final output. Even then you'll be able to see that the HD footage is superior...but it won't be anywhere near as obvious.

Re my immediate post above for review.
If you have mixed SD and HD sources - then create a project with the HDV parameter in VegasPro - that is 1440 x1080 - import all sources into this project.
But in the case of SD material keep your frame size within the 75% face coverage range of the available screen area. This is a formula used by broadcast for creating HD signal here in the US. You would likely center the SD frame, but you could move it anywhere in the border of the HDV area. Your choice aesthetic.

Now output to Blu-ray media stream as the HDV parameter for creating a Blu-ray in an authoring system like DVDAPro. When you encode in this way, your output will beat the sox off of any appearance on a DVD standard, even with strong problematic intervention to correct for DVD softness.

I'm not certain what I just read . . .

Yes, I don't understand why HDV got in the act. Either HD as it comes from those cameras (presumably 1920x1080) or SD. Are we talking about different frame rates?

HDV frame size and pixel aspect suit a Blu-ray standard. Frame rates nobody mentioned?

Because HDV frame size and pixel aspect bridge a suitable gap between SD and HD frames - it is a good choice for spreading the mix of SD/HD inputs and giving an HD illusion so to speak.

If you prefer set your frame size to full HD in project and edit accordingly - but you will get a better encode compromise if you render to HDV compatible Blu-ray video stream. Author in that standard in DVDAPro. Try it.

I would have thought that HDV (1440x1080) was too close to 1920x1080 to be a good compromise with SD. The geometric mean between NTSC SD (720x480) and full HD is approx 1176x720. This suggests 1280x720p as a good compromise, and what is more it is progressive, where the world should be heading.

I asked about frame rates in case that needed to be considered as well.

EDIT

No, that won't do either. Each field of full HD (which gets converted to a frame of 720p) has 1920x1080/2 = 1036800 pixels, which is too close to a a frame of 720p, ie 1280x720 = 921600 pixels.

PeterDuke - you are thinking it through, but maybe overthinking it I think! - Well there is a bit more than the pixel counting involved - reread my initial directions carefully.

What matters in this setup is what Vegas version you use to some extent governs how you can manage the control. I have using Vegas9.0e as the demo system.

Secondly what matters most in the outcome - is the codec to render to - I am sure you could play with formulas of different project sizes, but my goal in codec manipulation is to keep totally within the range of allowable streams for the Blu-ray spec. And as well achieve the middle ground of correspondence of SD and HD source resolutions.
Hence we upsize SD a small amount, and downsize some of the HD to a final HDV compromise.

And set your Project Settings to 32 bit floating point, Best render setting, De-interlace and have project media adjusted to match project settings. I also agree to set project media to 720 - 30p. Iused to have only two cams, an SD avi unit and a Canon HDV XH-A1 and this looked the best to me. I also would add black to the SD video before it is rendered. All of this makes for a very nice DVD. I would also have the renderer do a two pass with a CBR.
It is also good to test it on a decent HD TV to see the outcome. I did a lot of weddings and would test my DVD's on CRT units, LCD, Plasma and LED - lit and unlit. I always ask what the client will view it on.

So, software upscaling SD to one format that displays 1920x1080 is preferable to upscaling to another format that displays 1920x1080.

This has all gone a little too esoteric for me, I think.

musicvid10, sorry but your most recent post reads like a person who speed reads and does not absorb. What you stated in your single sentence of lament has no context in what has been said thus far in this thread. Perhaps you have to refresh the absorption rate along the criteria of the quick read.

Musicvid's statement makes perfect sense because HDV is expanded to 1920x1080 (that's what the 1.3333 PAR is all about).

As for not absorbing what is being read, I refer back to the OP's second post in this thread in which he says: "I am indeed limited to my clients playback method means I can render this in a format that works on DVD."

Thus, he must deliver on DVD. Despite this, you ignore (or didn't absorb) what he said, and keep giving advice that he should deliver on Blu-Ray, and also keep disparaging DVD, even though we've had several threads in the past year in which show that Blu-Ray is not being demanded by the customers of this forum's members. This is a good example of such a thread:

How are Blurays going where you are?

To be clear, I think Blu-Ray is great, but I also am quite certain that DVD is still the workhorse for most people in this forum, even though it is SD resolution. For HD delivery, other options are proving to be in higher demand, despite the lack of menus, packaging, and other advantages you get with round shiny discs.

Over at the doom9.org forum, they do not allow discussion of what is "better." I think this is a good example of why they have that rule: DVD is not "better" than Blu-Ray, and Blu-Ray is not "better" than DVD. They are each excellent, appropriate choices, depending on the situation.

Where would you ever get the idea that HDV has to be expanded to HD sizing. Does not happen in the NLE, does not happen in the authoring system for Blu-ray. The only display work comes in the intelligence of the interface between the player mechanism and the display it is routed to. In the Blu-ray spec.

Somewhere between the 1440x1080 1.33 PAR pixels and my 1920x1080 Samsung display, it gets expanded.