ive made a few standard definition dvds using my high definition canon hv20 and they seem to be not of the best quality. is there somethign i need to do to the footage like downconvert it or something so it looks better on a sd dvd?

If it's in standard DVD it's already been downconverted. How you do it is the issue.

Need much more info. HW, SW, workflow, encoding settings?

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Adam
Proud owner of 8, no, 7, no, wait, now NINE Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

i dont really know any of the questions, i let my dvd authoring program do everything usually. i usually render the file as an hd file, should i make it so it produces it as a sd file

You don't know what hardware and software you are using? How can we possibly tell if you're doing something wrong if we don't know what it is you're doing?

__________________
Adam
Proud owner of 8, no, 7, no, wait, now NINE Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

oh haha i didnt know what hw and sw are, i have a canon hv20 and edit with ulead video studio 10, but am thinking about purchasing vegas

That helps a little, but you really need to be specific about what you were expecting and what you are getting, and what steps you are taking. And you'll have much better luck posting this in the Ulead forum so other Ulead users can help you.

Dennis, Rich, maybe this can be moved into the right forum?

__________________
Adam
Proud owner of 8, no, 7, no, wait, now NINE Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

Well, it is very difficult for people to help you if you can't explain your problem. Telling people what software you are using would help.

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Moving this thread...




Rich

Did you try to tweak the settings/option in Ulead Video Studio 10. I have used version 11.5plus for that software. I think if you go somewhere in options, you should select "2 Pass Encoding". The default is Single pass encoding, which produces fast but poor quality results. Also, if you are watching the DVD on your HDTV, the picture quality will be inferior then what you would see by connecting your camcorder directly to TV (Since DVD is 480i and your camcorder is shooting 1080i).