Question: Am I losing quality by editing my HD footage in a 720 x 480 sequence?

[eppdidit]

Am I really losing quality if I shoot in 720P and edit in a 720 x 480 sequence? My understanding was that I'm shooting in a higher resolution, therefore the quality will be the same no matter what size the settings were. A freind advised me that I AM Losing quality and I need to edit in 720P timeline.

I assumed the only reason to edit in a 720P setting was if you were planning to dump the footage to an HD source?

Have I been screwing myself out of a better image? Can someone explain the reasoning along with their answer.

thanks!

[Barry_Green]

Depends on how you're planning on exhibit your footage. If you're only showing it on a DVD, then you're fine; DVDs are only 720x480 anyway. But if you wanted to go make a high-def master of you're edited footage, then yes you're kind of hosed.

[DCSensui]

You spelled "losing" correctly -- you're among a rare breed!

Don't know what you're editing on but you might want to edit in 720p and down-convert to DVD's. As Barry said, editing in 720p will allow you to repurpose what you've done in the future.

To answer your question, you won't lose quality by downconverting and editing in SD if your final output is in SD. There might be some framing issues when going from 16:9 to 4:3 if your program isn't letterboxed.

You might want to test this before committing to a workflow. For example, when encoding to the DVD, you might get a cleaner or more detailed result if you encode from an HD source rather than an SD source. Also, encoding from HD means doing a format conversion just once (HD to SD DVD) rather than twice (HD to SD to DVD).