I've just bought a Kodak zx1 HD camcorder, and I'm very impressed with the quality of the footage when played back directly from the camcorder on the TV via the HDMI cable. (The TV is about three years old, not state-of-the-art but HD ready). So far, so good!

However, I want to make copies of the footage for a couple of family members who don't have HD ready TVs. I've tried burning a DVD on the PC (using Roxio Creator 2010), but it comes out very jerky, and the sound doesn't work. Do I need to change something in the Roxio settings? Or doesn't HD footage work on anything non-HD?...in which case should I be using the VGA setting instead? It seems a shame to sacrifice the brilliant HD quality altogether, just because *some* of the intended recipient DVD players are non-HD.

Or is it the fps setting that's causing the jerkiness? I've been using the 60fps setting so far (as I assumed this would give me the best quality) but would I be better off with 30 fps? What are the advantages of one over the other?

Huge thanks in advance for any advice.

Well, technically, neither are ideally suited for transfer to Uk DVD because our PAL TV standard uses 25fps, so in order to show a 30fps video some frames have to be dropped, resulting in a little jerkiness.

However, if Roxio can be set to 'NTSC' before burning the DVD, you'll get a DVD @ 30fps albeit at a slightly lower resolution. Most DVD players will play NTSC video and most modern TVs will also.

Obviously the DVD won't be HD, but if the source is HD then the result should be pretty good nonetheless.

Thanks so much for replying; that's really helpful. Interestingly, the camcorder itself has an option to choose PAL or NTSC within the settings. So, if I select NTSC (it's currently set to PAL), will that compromise anything quality-wise?
Thanks again for your reply, I appreciate it.

Try running the file through DVDFlick, its free.

Thanks. Is it better than Roxio?

After a quick peek at the zx1 on Amazon, I'm fairly sure the PAL/NTSC option is only for the composite/AV socket output on the camcorder - it won't affect the recordings.

Briefly, the terms PAL and NTSC refer to different broadcast standards used around the world. PAL is used in the UK elsewhere and NTSC is used in the US and Japan to name a couple.

PAL operates at 576i @ 25fps; NTSC is 480i @ [nearly] 30fps. Clearly, Roxio just does frame dropping when doing the conversion from 30 to 25 fps. If you stick with NTSC this won't happen, but the picture quality won't be as good (although in practice it isn't really that noticeable).

To get the best picture quality, do what neo_wales suggests and seek out some software that'll do the conversion from whatever format the zx1 shoots in to 25fps MPEG-2 - the UK DVD video format. Then use Roxio as before to create your DVD. (Roxio won't then try to 'convert' the footage as by this point it'll already have been done)

Sorry I can't direct you to PC softwares for doing this as I'm on a Mac with it's own set of tools for doing this kind of stuff.

Edit: Looks like DVD Flick will do the whole thing.

Thanks zapod, that's really helpful. I'll try the steps you suggested and see how it goes.

OK, I downloaded DVD Flick and used it to burn a DVD. The picture quality is superb now--a hundred times better than it was before, and almost as good as the original HD files.

BUT...the audio is now out of sync! Aaaargh! I'm gutted because I really thought I'd cracked it when I saw the good quality picture. I've looked at the settings on DVD Flick and there doesn't seem to be anything I can change to get the audio on sync.

So...I'm stumped again. I've got fantastic picture and audio from the original HD files (which are Quicktime .MOV). I can burn them onto a DVD with Arcsoft (the software that comes with the camcorder) or Roxio, which gives in-sync audio but terrible quality picture. Or I can use DVD Flick and get terrific picture and out of sync audio. There must be a way I can get everything to work! Anything else I could try?

Thanks again for your help...I really appreciate it.

Sorry to bump my own thread...I've just been experimenting with various settings to try and burn a decent quality DVD, but I'm no closer to a solution. At the moment I'm still stuck with two unsatisfactory options: really bad video quality (from Arcsoft and Roxio) or excellent video quality but out-of-sync sound (from DVD Flick).

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has successfully burned a good quality DVD from the kodak zx1's .MOV files, and if so, how did you do it? Thanks again if anyone can advise.

dont know if you can get it into an iso - dvd shrink maybe

imgburn will then burm the iso with no problem.