After trying to get some direct answer from the web the best I could end up with is: If the material is DV it is lower field first. Anything else use upper field first. In other words – stay with your source.

My experience with the DVDs I made to date is that it does not matter what you use. All the players I used, and those of our clients, play either - as well as progressive - just fine.

I am talking PAL land.

Edit: Even more embarrassed. Till this thread I have never noticed it in either.

Willem.

Willem,

I cannot 'stay with my source', as it is always progressive :)

I need to convert to one of the PAL formats when delivering DVDs, and now - with lots of head scratching - I'm unsure which...

Piotr

Generally is it best to render to the field order that matches your source. Vegas is rather unique in that it will adapt the video for the project output. Other encoders I have used will not and you end up with very bad video.

Dave T2

Piotr, why do you not stay with progressive? Or are you starting with 50p, in which case you need to change and it does not matter which way you go - as far as I remember traditionally it used to be lower field first.. PAL DVD players are fine with 25p.

Lately we are mostly shooting in 1280x720 50p. It seems to produce the best results for our needs when downrezzing to 720x576 (we usually use lower field first - sometimes progressive). YMMV.

Edit:
After reading your above posts again and also checking up on the available project options I need to add a bit.

IMX is always specified as upper field first – at least from what I could find (and I had to research it only recently). IMX is an I frame only format Sony apparently developed to replace beta tape – a digital equivalent of the analogue format. You can only render it to a mxf file.

I would think that is the reason for the IMX project option – if you want your project as 720x576. Since we usually edit at higher project resolution we will only downrez for the final DVD mpeg2 files it does not apply.

My meeting with IMX was when we recently, for the first time, had to deliver a transmission ready SD program to a local station with all the color bars, tones, countdown clocks, black bits, station idents (supplied by them) etc. – all specified to the second and frame (was quite interesting doing that). Up till now all our edits, mostly sport programs, were finished for transmission by some other post house. The specifications we were given allowed for us to supply the program as an IMX mxf file on a hard drive – needed to be the only file on the drive. The problem started when they specified lower field first. Vegas can only render IMX as upper field first (hence all the research). To make a long story short, rather than stir we eventually just supplied it as upper field first without saying a word. It was transmitted with no complaints from them.

So, you cannot place an IMX file on a DVD – the mpeg2 requirements still are as before.

Willem.

Thanks everyone for the comments - I'm well aware that when creating 50i DVD from 1080/25p, it really doesn't matter which field order you choose - the video will look exactly the same on the computer screen.

All I'm asking for here is the answer to a very simple question: which is the "official" format of -say- Hollywood movies published on DVD; is it what Vegas calls "Standard/IMX" or "DV" PAL?

Piotr

Piotr, you posted while I added the above edit.

Also remember most of Hollywood will be a 24p DVD. I could as of yet - same as you - not find any "official" format. I would risk saying, coming from 25p (and if you want to provide it as interlaced) stick to your lower field first.

Willem.

As others have already mentioned, it plain doesn't matter what the field order is.

My understanding is that the key difference between the DV and IMX variant is that IMX is more than 720x576. IMX includes lines outside the picture area to carry things such as closed caption data. PAL is in fact 625 lines, of those only 576 are active picture.

Bob.