Having MUCH Mini-DV material, and quite a few edited videos in
the same format, but being impressed with how much better good HDV
can look (even from a cheap, 1-chip HDV Canon HV20 compared
with one of the best Mini-DV camcorders, the 3-chip Sony VX2000),
I was hoping there was a reasonable way to upsample my Mini-DV
footage to look at least reasonably good on a sharp 42" 1080p LCD,
viewed at 6.5'. I had noticed that standard definition DVDs made from
Mini-DV often looked somewhat better on that screen than the original
Mini-DV (the DVD player I use has 3-connections for the video output,
but it is not progressive scan - but it did noticeably reduce stair-stepping
artifacts, the bane of Mini-DV). SD also looks good on my 32" 720p
LCD - although good HD material doesn't look as good on it as it does
on the other LCD. In Premiere Elements 4, I used some good Mini-DV
material to export a 4 minute DV-AVI file. I used the same material to
also export an MPEG (DVD) file. I then deinterlaced the material and
again exported DV-AVI and MPEG files. In Elements 4, I exported
an HDV m2t file of each to the camcorder and compared them. The
Mini-DV -> HDV was acceptable (somewhat soft, with some slight
stairstepping still evident with motion on contrasty edges), but it was
not what I was hoping for (well, I admit it - I was hoping for a miracle,
although I really knew that one can't create information from what was
not there to begin with...). The MPEG file looked softer, and less
desirable. I bothered looking only at the deinterlaced Mini-DV to HDV
footage, and it was the worst. The next day, I had an "AH-HAH!"
thought, so I tried converting and exporting the Mini-DV file in Sony
Vegas Pro 8. Sure enough - compared on the timeline, it looked great.
But, sigh....! On tape, on the TV, it *was* sharper than the Premiere
processed footage (and when there was no motion, the image looked
very nice), but with motion, the stair-stepping drove me up the wall
and down the other side. The result was unacceptable (except when
the camera had been stationary, untrue for 99.9% of my footage...;-).
I did not check it, but my impression was that the Mini-DV processed
in Premiere Elements 4 to become HDV was maybe a tad better than
footage converted to SD MPEG, put on a DVD, and viewed on the
same TV (which upsamples everything put into it to 1080p), although
it was somewhat (but not unacceptably) soft.

Maybe there are other methods that I don't know about for doing
what I want well...?
--
David Ruether
 d_ruet...@hotmail.com
 www.donferrario.com/ruether