To Field render or not to Field render… thats the Question

[Darby Edelen]

[henry_b] “i want to make a dvd that will be seen in DVD players ( TV ) and on Computers”

Computers are very extensible and forgiving, as long as you have the right program/codec you can view just about anything on a computer. Set top DVD Players are not: they want something very specific.

You should create your DVD to spec for set top DVD players and let the computer worry about how to interpret that (most do a fine job using software emulation).

I don’t know what Country/Region you’re producing for but I can tell you that in the US your renders out of AE should be NTSC DV/D1 or Widescreen (depending on whether you want 4:3 or 16:9) which is the standard format for TV (non-HD).

Depending on what program you’re using to make the DVD you may have to encode your footage yourself into an MPEG-2 for video and AC3 for audio. iDVD and DVD Studio Pro can work with standard QT files and do this encoding for you, but you don’t get as much control over it.

[Filip Vandueren]

AFAIK a computer playing back an interlaced DVD (with an up-to-date DVD player program anyway) will simulate playing progrsseive at twice the frame-rate, but of course with half the vertical resolution.

So the trade-off in choosing interlaced or not is this:
what’s more important: fast smooth motion, or sharpness and detail.

smooth fast motion -> interlaced.
maximum (or perhaps too much) crispy sharpness -> noninterlaced.

In theory (and in my experience very often in practice) non interlaced will encode cleaner with less artefacts for lower bitrates in MPEG2.

BTW. if the main source of your footage comes from interlaced video, go with the format of your source !
You only really have the choice when you’re creating something from scratch wit motion graphics. If you’re throwing away one field from an interlaced DV movie to create a ‘sharper’ progressive image, we’re fooling ourselves.