I have an HG10 and am thinking about the best format for archiving files. My goal is to keep them as high quality as possible, in a format comaptible with Xbox 360 to let my family view them conveniently.

There are endless threads across various forums for what tools to use for re-encoding, and I have deciphered a process that works for me.

My question is, what is the best profile for the encoded file? I am keeping the bitrate and framerate equal to the source, but would it be better to output at 1920x1080 or 1440x1080? I have tested both and I am unable to detect a difference either on my PC or streaming to my TV (TV and XBox both support 1080p). I am assuming since the video has already been transcoded to 1440 on disk write, there is no advantage to re-encoding the files to 1920?

Because AVCHD, and Most HDV is 1440x1080i You will get the best encode quaility per bit at 1440x1080 with the 4:3 Pixel Aspect ratio. Not all encoders support this option.

Because Xbox 360 has such a lousy deinterlacer you may wish to convert everything to 720p59.94 Which has great support across the board.

If you are going to go with 1080i just be aware that doing editing in Movie Maker, Certain Versions of Premiere and others may invert the field order after cuts, which can cause jerkiness on playback.

Some people will argue that the reduced resolution will impact the picture quality, but there are some definite gains if you are encoding at less than 10mbps, and not having to worry about interlacing is a huge plus.

If you are Really ambitious and using windows Media encoder you can't beat 960x540 at 59.94fps encoded at VBR Quality 95. Your Files will average about 6.5 MBPS and when presented at 1080i will have the same quality as a 960x1080i would. You can do the same thing with 1440x540 and a Non-Square Pixel.

Brandon Wirtz
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