Best MiniDV to HDTV output?

[bowmah]

So just transferred 1 hour of video from a MiniDV to AVI using Microsoft Import in Windows Vista. Quality was not good. Very jagged edges and lots of jitter. Tried using Adobe Elements 3 to do teh transfer and video quality was good again. SO my question now is, what is the best way to output that miniDV footage so that it plays nicely on a 1080P LCD. Should I just output at SD or can I try some HD + keep aspect ratio with letterbox? Any tips would be great.

[jagabo]

You should be transfering from the camcorder into a DV AVI file. That simply puts the DV data that's on the tape into an AVI file -- there is no loss of quality that way. Then most players will automatically deinterlace on playback on the computer.

[Bjs]

If you want to try conversion to HD then WinX HD Video Converter is being given away till the 16th of this month ... costing you nothing and if your not happy with end results then you decide if you want to keep it or uninstall it

[jagabo]

Generally, you won't gain anything by converting standard definition DV to HD frame sizes. Especially with interlaced video.

[edDV]

...SO my question now is, what is the best way to output that miniDV footage so that it plays nicely on a 1080P LCD. Should I just output at SD or can I try some HD + keep aspect ratio with letterbox?

If by "1080p LCD" you mean an LCD-TV, normal output would be DVD spec interlace MPeg2 (high bitrate) or uncompressed 480i/576i via HDMI or analog component. The upscale would be handled by hardware in the media player or inside the HDTV. H.264 is another option but it would be suboptimal for interlace video.

As Jagabo said, there is little advantage to software upscale. It is normally done when including SD source in an HD edit project.