I've had good luck with up-rezed SD original inside an HD project in FCP. It depends to some extent on what the footage looks like (more so than the quality of the SD format - the stuff I had from from a cheap DV camcorder...). If you don't want to crop the SD image to 16:9, I'd pillar-box it, but that still involves up-rezing from 480 vertical to 720 or 1080. At their native resolution, they'll be too tiny on the screen. Up-rezing shouldn't introduce the artifacting Edwin mentions, but there could be other issues involved, like frame rate conversion, deinterlacing...
If you're in Final Cut world, the big trick is getting a good BluRay authored. DVDSP won't do BluRay, though there's a work around. Toast has a minimal BluRay authoring function, but the encoding stinks. If you don't have a true BluRay authoring alternative available (I think Adobe will do it on a Mac, everything else is on the PC side AFAIK), you'll need that workaround. I have it written down somewhere. Let me know if you need it and i'll hunt it down.
For FCP people, a better mobile option, if you can get your hands on one cheap as they're now obsolete, is a Toshiba HD-DVD player. DVDSP can author discs for that without any special voodoo, and you can write them to standard DVD5 blanks (just not as much run time per disc at the same settings, natch). 30 minutes will fit in excellent quality MPEG (more if you use H264, but that complicates the workflow a bit). For a program of shorts, this shouldn't be a problem.
But, if you break the program into several discs, you could, as Edwin suggests, group the SD together and HD together, so you have the SD stuff on an SD disc, since the player (HD-DVD or BluRay) will handle either, and up-convert it. (A benefit of the Toshibas was/is their superior upconverting hardware)
djt
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Received on Thu Jun 02 2011 - 06:50:10 CDT
