Sorted

Compressor's HD to SD transcoding just doesn't cut it, even without standards conversion. Just unacceptable results.

I've cut my losses and rented the tape deck back in. Now all I have to do is sit here and wait whilst Sony's hardware downscaler makes stuff look shiny in real time. Much nicer.

The Sony HVR-M25 is a fairly neat bit of kit, complete with mostly unnecessary but very cool looking footage display on the front screen. Inputs are oddly lacking (just S-Video) for an HD Deck that boasts recording, but a full compliment of outputs are available including HDMI and all that nonsense. Visual Impact, the rental place I use, also supplied the thickest component video cable I've ever seen.

All this churning away is giving me ample time to push the menu concepts into production - the storyboard/planning process is one I quite enjoy, particularly so when I have free reign over the content. My earlier request to release these Travelogues as PAL was in hindsight a double edged sword - the time I projected to save would've been wasted converting the Motion templates, which I've already started in NTSC, to PAL. C'est la vie.