Thanks, Roy, for the detailed response. I'm going to continue experimenting, and I'm sure that your tips will help.

One other update. Based on some earlier posts in this thread, I investigated HD media players, and decided to experiment with one from Seagate. The unit uses one of Seagate's small external hard drives, which I already owned, so the investment wasn't too significant. It has an HDMI outplut, so I can produce a move to a file, copy it to my hard drive, dock it with the player, and just hit play.

So far, I'm pretty impressed. It takes some time to figure out how to configure both the video editing software and the player, but my last test (using PD) was excellent. Similar experiments with Studio were not very impressive, but I'm still testing the settings.

I'm going to experiment with some of the output settings in PD, as discussed by Roy and others, but if anyone has any tips on what to use in this situation, please feel free to let me know. At this point, I'm basically using the best resolution available, since the only impact is hard drive space, which is cheap these days.


Thanks, -------------------------
Hardware: HP Pavilion e91500t, Intel Core i7, Vista 64bit, 6GB ram, ATI Radeon HD 4650
Software: Trial version of PowerDirector 8

Hi all.

I've recently learned by trial and error on my first project since buying PD8 two months ago. One thing I did learn was that the PD8 guide appears to be not very clear about video output quality.

I have been very unhappy about the results coming from PD8 as I trialed my project through producing it. (I previously had PD 5 for JVC and knew the results were better then..sure enough, I imported an old PD5 project to PD8 and noticed lower quality at the authored stage. This helped me see where I was going wrong though).

What I've mistakingly been doing in PD8 is producing a final interlaced MPEG2 file ready to import into the 'create disc' (the source video is interlaced MOD) files. But the quality improves considerably if instead, I produce a progressive MPEG file to be outputed on to DVD disc (I'm assuming the authoring reinstates the interlacing). Even introducing some video enhancement in the editing stage works wonders now).

My only gripe now though is that if this is the way it works, then I'm limited in using SVRT between my source and finished files?

I haven't though tried importing a PDR file project directly into the authoring stage and wonder if this is the best way to process nice clean interlaced work?

Thanks,
Matt