Is this the best I can do?

[so]

Took some video of our nephew's baseball game on a Sony HDR-XR550...I used Premiere Elements to capture, edit and burn to DVD (MPEG-2). The results were just so-so....in fact I don't see any visible difference in this and my old Sony Handycam (MiniDv) movies. This is very disappointing. In fact it looks crappy on our HDTV.

So as a total novice at this I am asking for advice as to how to get better results.

The files were transferred to the pc as AVCHD Video (m2ts) - but I'm not sure what happens once they are edited in Elements. (I believe they are AVI files..?) I do know that if I burn to DVD they are converted to MPEG-2.

The edited movie is approx 47 minutes long 2.82 GBs on DVD. Elements does give the option to burn to blu-ray and would be 8.82 GBs. But with costs of blu-ray discs I hesitate to burn if you don't expect a lot better results. I also don't know if other family members would be able to play a blu-ray disc if they dont have a blu-ray player. (?)

Thank you in advance for your patience with me as I try to figure this out with your help.

[guns1inger]

By choosing to go to DVD you have resized the image back down to SD resolution, so it is in fact no better than your old handycam in that respect. However it is still the most universally playable format. if Premiere Elements gives you the option to output as m2ts files you could use MultiAVCHD to turn these into HD format structures that can be burned to DVD and played on the PS3 and quite a few Bluray players. However they cannot be played on standard DVD players.

I don't use Premiere Elements, but I suspect that it does limit your options somewhat as far as how much tweaking you can do to improve the output. Chance are that if you output as HD (m2ts, for example), then use something like AVStoDVD to create the DVD and do the encoding, you will get better quality. However it still will be DVD, and therefore not HD quality.