CRT projectors areinherently 4:3 devices, so that is where my bias comes in. Also on a screen that size you do see the quality drop in the conversion to 16:9, small as it is."
True, but after some experimentation, I found that using 3-2-2-3 pull-down on my AVI master made a slight improvement, so I made the footage progressive. It looks pretty nice on my neighbor's 60 inch widescreen tv.
"To the guys that are using there digicams to digitise the footage, it is a nice and easy method, but they are not the best quality wise, and you are also throwing away a lot of chroma resolution by downsampling to 4:1:0 before then re-transcoding it AGAIN to DVD.
Ideally You really want to come in to an uncompressed stream, that retains full chroma resolution. (4:4:4)"
Agreed, but this is just the first step in a continuing line of improvements I intend to make. Since I wanted a digicam anyways for home videos, I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. After buying that, two 160 and one 250 GB hard drives, and a laserdisc player (my third, don't ask), I figured I'd see what I could do so far. In the future, I'd like to get a high-end model video-capture card, but using dedicated hardware to capture/convert the footage seemed a decent place to start.
"As for the soundtrack, from my reading, the SE versions have had a full remix done from the original multitude of mono and stereo tracks, but I will wait and see what the sound is like."
Maybe I should clarify....I was referring to the SE LD's, not the upcoming SE DVD's. The LD's were done strictly from analog sources. Burtt has digitized all known audio sources (save an occasional line of dialogue or foley effect) to remix the DVD soundtracks.