Scale to SD and then encode, or scale during encode?

[katieburchett]

A friend who has professional encoding software is going to encode some footage for me to MPEG2 DVD. I have a HD timeline in Premiere Pro and I'm just wondering if I should export uncompressed HD or uncompressed SD, to give them to encode? Note: the reason they are encoding for me is because Premiere Pro did not do a good enough job at encoding to mpeg2.

[poisondeathray]

Ask your friend what s/he prefers

But if it's interlaced HD, definitely do NOT do it in PP. Very poor interlaced scaling

[katieburchett]

Ask your friend what s/he prefers

But if it's interlaced HD, definitely do NOT do it in PP. Very poor interlaced scaling

Ok! It's progressive. Do different encoders/NLE's scale differently? Would Scaling to SD in PP be any different from doing it anywhere else?

[poisondeathray]

Ask your friend what s/he prefers

But if it's interlaced HD, definitely do NOT do it in PP. Very poor interlaced scaling

Ok! It's progressive. Do different encoders/NLE's scale differently? Would Scaling to SD in PP be any different from doing it anywhere else?

Yes they can - there are many different scaling algorithms available. Even within PP, you have a few choices (e.g. when MRQ is on with CUDA it uses modified lanczos2 + bicubic lowpass, but uses bicubic only when CPU only is used ) . Some resizers are sharper than others - which might be good in some situations but bad in others. For example , if the source footage was "soft" , a sharper resizer might be appropriate. If it was typical HD footage, a "sharp" resizer would usually be a bad idea for DVD

But preparing for a DVD, even progressive, might include a few other steps like lowpassing, denoising certain sections, filtering others- Your friend should be able to provide any instructions if they want something else done

[LMotlow]

No information on the format of your source, other than it HD progressive. DVD is usually (note, usually, not always) interlaced at 29.97i NTSC or 25i PAL. If the HD matreial is progressive and runs at 60p as many HD camera videos do, you'll have to interlace after downscaling. DVD can't be encoded for anything other than 29.97 or 25 fps.