I also recorded with two microphones best placed for the choir. As I already said, my clip showing the full scene uses the sound from the camera, while the blow-up of the compere uses the sound from the close microphones.

In retrospect I could have had another microphone near the compere, because my recorder takes up to 8 simultaneous channels, but I didn't.

If you look at the full scene, you will see the left microphone appearing to be above the pianist's head and the right microphone appearing to be above the head of the lady second from left. The mics are actually placed at the quarter and three-quarter points of the breadth of the choir, and sufficiently distant from the choir to not have the front row dominate.

I have recorded the audio and made CDs for many years and have found this to give good separation and to work well. It is not always optimum for the guest artists because I never know in advance where they are going to stand. The CDs only have music, no compere's comments.

BTW, you did notice the emoticon in my post? My statement was meant to be tongue in cheek - I have to weigh up pros and cons of several alternatives and what might be generally best for the few viewers of the final work. My guess is that most people will only have a DVD player, and in that case the blur of the highly zoomed compere won't be noticeable at all. Some people may only be interested in just a video file, which can be almost any resolution.

But I also want a high-resolution Blu-ray version for myself at least, because I like menus to find items quickly.

I remember years ago I had an audio peripheral, which had an ipod socket, connected to my then 50-inch TV set. A young friend noticed it and connected his portable player to it. All his movies had low resolution suitable for a small portable device. I thought his movies looked terrible when shown on a big screen, but he was over the moon!

Okay, you recorded the sound separately (hopefully it will stay in-sync with your videorecording), this wasn't hearable from the sample you provided.

Back to your final question "Best way to reduce shimmering noise", I think everything has been said. From what I've seen here, best result is provided by a third party denoise plugin (which is quite expensive). Vegas tools for this are unfortunately still not optimal working or terribly slow in use.

Personally, I'm always striving for optimal audio and video during recording and try to avoid in post corrections. Something like zooming in on a video recording far beyond the final resolution I would never do.

I am prepared to re-sync the sound for each item or bracket separately, if necessary. We will see.

Neat Video is not cheap but looks good and is affordable, so I will look into that.

I did a test comparison on my TV of 1280x720-50p AVC 16 Mbps versus 1920x1080-50i AVC 16 Mbps, both rendered with disable resample on the clip properties. When viewed from a distance, they both looked much the same to my ancient eyes with cataracts developing, but the 1080-50i looked slightly washed-out compared to the 720-50p. When viewed close up, both looked grossly over-sharpened, but the greater blur on the 720-50p softened it somewhat. I saw no evidence of deinterlace artifacts on the 1080-50i.

In view of the above and the fact that my zooming won't appear so bad with 720-50p, I will probably go with it.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and advice.

Just one more thought about this. Your original recording is 2160p25, what sense does it make (with disabled resampling) to make 720p50 instead of 720p25 out of it. It only doubles frames and rendertime.

It would also compare 1080p25/p24 with your 1080i50 and 720p25/p50 on your TV.

At 1280x720, DVD Architect (and probably my BD player too) only supports 60p, 50p, 24p and 23.8976p, so 720p25 is not an option.

What do you mean by 1080p25/p24? Slow down my 25 fps to 24? If so, I would either get a small drop in pitch or I would have to use elastique time-stretch or similar, which may noticeably affect the music quality for people with better ears than what mine are now.

both looked grossly over-sharpened

@PeterDuke Check your TV's sharpness setting. I have mine turned right down. I suspect that many TV sets have it high by default to make the picture look "good"!

At 1280x720, DVD Architect (and probably my BD player too) only supports 60p, 50p, 24p and 23.8976p, so 720p25 is not an option.

What do you mean by 1080p25/p24? Slow down my 25 fps to 24? If so, I would either get a small drop in pitch or I would have to use elastique time-stretch or similar, which may noticeably affect the music quality for people with better ears than what mine are now.

Sorry I forgot about that you're still burning Blu-rays.

When you're worrying about audio pitch changing or whatever, there's also another option to get 24fps out of 25fps without this audio issue.

I will upload later today some rendered samples of your uploaded sample, so you can compare picture and audio quality.

What do you mean by 1080p25/p24? Slow down my 25 fps to 24? If so, I would either get a small drop in pitch or I would have to use elastique time-stretch or similar, which may noticeably affect the music quality for people with better ears than what mine are now.

It's also possible to convert 25p to 24p without time stretching or pitch shifting audio, just the old-fashioned way by resampling.

Following samples are done without any FX.

2160p25 to 720p50 (no resampling):

2160p25 to 1080p25

2160p25 to 1080p24 (with resampling)

See the remarkable difference between sharpness/details between 720 and 1080.

(Of course, the zooming effect I created, looks more fluent with 50p than with 25/24p.)

Of course!

I had a mind-set against resampling because there would be some loss in video quality, but there is also loss in quality when downsizing to 720p, which I had also originally rejected for the same reason. I hadn't thought of directly comparing the two.

I could also look at using Twixtor (which I have) for the conversion. The subject matter generally has simple motion suited to its algorithm, but I might have to do the conversion at 1080p not 2160p.

Thanks for the suggestion and your presentation!

Could I prevail upon you for your opinion of 2160p25 to 1080i50 (25 fps interlaced, with clip properties set to "disable resample" during render)?

Because your recording is very static, fixed camera and hardly moving objects, loss in video quality due to resampling is hardly visible. Just when you create movement, like I did by zooming in/out, resampling will cause some visible ghosting.

I didn't compare your sample with 1080i50 yet, because 1080i50 is actually half frames with only 540 lines each and without 1/50 sec time difference.

I will make a sample later today.