You may be able to download a trial version. I've got some material shot outdoors on the EX1 that I can run through Squeeze this afternoon if you want.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not sure if you are responding to my post Perrone, but if you are thanks for the offer. I already have Squeeze 4.5 though so I can try it on that. Offer much appreciated though. If you have some suggested settings, I would greatly appreciate that.

Regards,

John

Having gone through this entire thread, it's obvious I am doing something wrong (maybe I don't know any better).

From day one, after getting the EX3, I have been shooting in HD--1080 30p exclusively--and delivering in SD on DVD without any trouble. The images are beautiful and sharp (as sharp as SD can get) without any issues. My clients are thrilled and I am thrilled, so I guess I'll just have to live with it.

I don't understand what's going on.

We all know that Jay. You have said that several times before.

John

You know Jay, if at any time you don't get excellent results from an EX3 you should maybe check into getting into another career...I'm just saying

Okay, John, then can you explain to me what the problem is? I honestly don't understand why so many people are having issues getting good looking DVDs from HD material.

I'm not that special!

Randy, I've heard the same from EX owners (and I have seen footage from EX owners that looked like garage because they didn't know what they were doing). I've seen stunning DVDs from HD material by others. Yet there seems to be as many not getting good results and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.

The only real variable would be workflow. But whenever I mention that as a possibility certain people get their undies all bunched up as if it were some personal attack.

I didn't mean for my post to appear snarky, but I can see how it may have been taken that way. Please, accept my apologies. That was not my intention.

@farss: "I'll also say this is something SCS should be doing more about to assist all of us. Doesn't matter how good the product is, if the users cannot figure out how to use it correctly, it's lost."Amen to that statement!! We should have an easy/foolproof path to downrezzing HD to SD. There are entirely too many threads devoted to this subject.

...Jerry

"We should have an easy/foolproof path to downrezzing HD to SD."

Jerry, here's what I do, and I don't see how it could get any easier...

-- Open Vegas (projects are always 1920 x 1080 30p, render is set to "best").
-- I drop the footage into the timeline, edit, tweak, and sweeten as needed.
-- Select "DVD Architect NTSC video stream" and render the video and audio files for burning.
-- Open DVDS and burn the DVD.

Jay,

I'll take your word for it that your procedure works great for videos whose source is 1920 x 1080 30p. But what about folks whose source is other formats?

I know for a fact that if my source is 1920 x 1080 60i , I'll have problems with flicker (see my example link above).

Others have documented softness problems (you'll need to search this forum). Hence all the discussion of adding the Sharpen FX, set to zero.

The OP of this thread has a 1440 x 1080 60i source which seems to introduce ever more problems.

So, let me rephrase my statement, "We should have an easy/foolproof path to downrezzing HD to SD - whatever format the source HD was shot in".

...Jerry

Edit: On second thought, let's make the statement, "I'd like to see a feature that provides an easy/foolproof path to downrezzing HD to SD - whatever format the source HD was shot in." I don't want to sound like a complainer (we have enough of those in this forum).

I didn't mean for my post to appear snarky, but I can see how it may have been taken that way. Please, accept my apologies. That was not my intention.

Jay I've never seen you being snarky before so I should've known better....in fact maybe I'm the one that needs to apologize for indeed being snarky but in my own defense I've got two big projects looking pretty crappy that can't be re-shot and feeling like punching myself in the face.
What's weird is I had read so many posts before stating HDV to DVD always looks better than SD to DVD (or at least as good and one will have the HD if it's needed later).
Anyway, sorry Jay.

Exactly what I do to and I don't have any problems although I shoot 50i.
I don't have a problem with 1920x1080 50i or 1440x1080 50i from my EX1.
I don't have a problem with 1440x1080 0i from my HC5.

I could list many more things I don't have a problem with.


None of that is much help to the people who are having problems.
The issue is not unique to Vegas users.
In part my understanding of some of the issues comes from a discusion I had with the developers on this very forum. That was back in the Sonic Foundry days regarding the practical implementation of the SinC function in software. Since then silence.

Bob.

Okay, John, then can you explain to me what the problem is? I honestly don't understand why so many people are having issues getting good looking DVDs from HD material.
=====================================
I don't think there is any one reason why so many are having these problems. Mine have improved, but I am still not satisfied. They look great on Plasma and LCD TVs. The biggest problem (as has been mentioned) are on NTSC CRT TVs which many many people still own. In my case I shoot under funky stage lighting all the time which complicates the problems.

HD to SD is the most common thread I see posted regularly on the DVInfo forums and others so apparently not everyone is happy with the results they are getting and it is too frequent for it to be solely a problem of user incompetence (workflow). Read Perrone's post fifth from the top. Are the variables he cited a matter of poor workflow on his part when he ran those tests?

The only reason I said what I said is that you have posted the same response many many times on similar threads.

Think about it. What kind of contribution to a thread is it to say (in effect):
I don't have a problem, therefore you shouldn't either?

John

Well I've learned a few things between this thread and my recent experiments that were inspired by it:

1/ I won't render to 704x480 anymore. It looks fine on my DVD player, but terrible in Windows Media Player.

2/ I love 30p. My 30p downrez test renders look better than my 60i downrez test renders.

3/ When downrezzing 30p HDV, make sure that Vegas doesn't deinterlace it. This is easy to miss. If your 30p is flagged ad 60i, Vegas will want to deinterlace it and it loses any advantage over 60i if this happens.

4/ That "sharpen with a value of zero" trick really improves the image. I really can't see any difference between putting the zero sharpen filter on the track or the individual events. I know that theoretically it should sharpen artifacts on transitions and fades, so I lowered the bitrate way down and did it both ways again. I still couldn't see enough difference to tell which was which if I tested blind. I really can't see much advantage to putting it on individual events. I also tried it on the master video bus, but it doesn't look good on titles. I think I'm just going to start putting it on the video tracks until someone shows me a test that lets me see an advantage to putting it on individual events.

Point 3) makes no sense at all.

Many cameras record 30p as 30PsF. The two fields have to be merged back to get the full frame back. If you fail to force Vegas to do this other problems can arise, especially when you apply effects.

Bob.

Many cameras record 30p as 30PsF. The two fields have to be merged back to get the full frame back.
=================
Bob,

I thought PsF is pretty much used only in 50Hz systems and not 60Hz systems. Also, isn't PsF devoid of any motion between the two fields making it quite different in that essentially both fields are the same?

John

> Point 3) makes no sense at all.

Maybe I said it wrong. When I shoot 30p, I've started to use the setting where the thirty progressive frames are captured as though they were 60i. I find that if I use this setting on my camera, that the video will smart-render in Vegas. If I use the true 30p progressive setting, it won't smart-render.

What I find is that when I'm doing a Vegas downrez with these 30p clips flagged as 60i clips, I will see all sorts of aliasing on the downrezzed render. This isn't theory. This is what I see in my tests. I can avoid this two alternate ways. One is that I can right click on the clips and change the flag to to progressive. Two is that I can set the deinterlace method to "none". If I'm doing a mix of progressive and interlaced material, I would be better off correcting the clips properties where necessary, but if all the footage in the project is 30p flagged as 60i, it is easier just to set the project deinterlace method to "none".

By the way, changing the project properties from interlaced to progressive has no effect whatsoever on smart-rendering back into a new 60i flagged file. Also, if I just change one clips properties, I can select all the other clips at once and paste the changed properties into them all at once, so it really isn't that big a deal to do it that way (which I suppose is the proper way).

I personally didn't take John Cline's post as anything other than another data point. This thread (& others, I guess) has a bunch of data points of things going wrong, so it's nice to hear when folks have something's that's working well for them. He's repeating it in this thread because it's a new thread. If EVERYONE read EVERY thread, then there would only be *one* HD-->SD thread instead of it being the "most common thread."

If someone else is having workflow success with my camera (or similar), then I want to hear about it. If I can't figure out a solution with my setup, then I'm definitely interested in hearing about rigs that seem immune from the problem. Maybe someone will eventually mention a great rig that I can actually afford! :)

"I thought PsF is pretty much used only in 50Hz systems and not 60Hz systems. Also, isn't PsF devoid of any motion between the two fields making it quite different in that essentially both fields are the same?"

Nope, used just as much n 60Hz systems as 50Hz systems, actually probably more used in 60Hz land than 50Hz land.

In 50Hz land you either have 25p as 25p, 25p > 50i or just vanilla 50i.

In 60Hz land you can have 24p as 24p, 24p > 60i (pulldown with 2 variants), 30p as 30p, 30p > 60i and vanilla 60i.

Down here film (ths kind with holes) is run at 25fps so no pulldown issues.

Bob.

I think we're both saying the exact same thing here.

If you get the camera to record 30PsF60 then quite likely the camera flags it as "i" and Vegas sees it as such. Indeed not good to leave it like that. Changing media properties to Progressive forces Vegas to simply merge the two fields back into the one original frame i.e. de-interlace.

I don't quite know though why if you don't do this you get jaggies unless the field order is messed up. It is possible to get a very nasty problem:

record this: 1a,1b,2a,2b where numbers are frames and a / b are the fields.
Somehow you can get 1b,2a,2b etc so the frames end up interlaced i.e. there is temporal separation. Big mess.


Bob.

I think that what is going on is that the progressive image that is flagged as interlaced is getting treated like interlaced. That on a resize it's being separated into odd and even fields which are then resized separately and then folded back together into a new resized image. I'm getting aliasing more than jaggies. Earlier today I did some tests on an interview I have with some course fabric in the background. The downrezzed 30p footage was full of aliasing when it was flagged as 60i, but this went away when it was correctly flagged as 30p. I imagine that I would have had the same problem if the footage was shot 60i and correctly flagged that way as well.

Edit: just noticed that Bob said exactly the same thing in his post first

The cool thing is that I can change the flags without interfering with smart-rendering. The flags don't matter at all when it's not being resized. It's just when it's downrezzed that it is important.

I'm amazed at how much better the downrezzes look with the "sharpen of zero" filter added. A while back I was experimenting with different degrees of sharpen on downrez. What I found was that while it seemed to improve things sometimes, other times it caused problems with fine designs. I never thought to try a value of zero. That seems to be the magic number.

Just want to make sure I'm clear on this: I'm putting the sharpen filter post pan/crop. In other words, the sharpening is added at the target SD rather than the source HD resolution. The results look very nice, but I want to be sure that that is what some of you who have more experience with this are doing and recommending. Is that correct?

I tried the trial of Squeeze 6.5 on HDV to SD mpg and could not see much difference in quality than I have been able to get going the VirtualDub route. (42 min file took 6+ hours on a Q6600)

Laurence's suggestion of MediaEspresso seems to be a simple and adequate method for much of what I do and comes in a close second to VirtualDub in overall quality.... (much better than V10 on fast motion video) (42 min file took 24 min)

Boggles the mind why the major NLE's don't just buy this $39 technology and include it if they are unable or unwilling to solve the problem themselves!