creating DVDs with "no" quality loss

[Petersen12]

Hello,

I shot an ambitious and professional short film with Panasonic HVX200 Mini35, 720*560, 50p, 16:9, PAL (I'm based in Europe), so it's basically DCVPRO 50, and it seems to work in a top field first mode.

The film seems to become great and I want to bring it to festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto..

Thus: the DVD which I will create must be perfect, with as little quality loss as possible.

For DVD Authoring, I also have Sony DVD Architect 4.0, which seems to be quite good.

I'm asking for all kinds of recommendations/questions to these answers:

1. With what encoding method (Canopus Procoder Express, Canopus loseless-AVI, Canopus HQ-AVI, Uncompromised RGB-AVI, ...) would you create the first file out of the timeline? How should my settings look like? For example, if I use Canopus HQ, it asks for codec settings: "Q" between 4 and 19, maximum size between 4 and 100.

2. (that's a basic question): Do I first have to render the timeline or is this automatically done when encoding (as mentioned in quesiton one)?

3. As EDIUS 4.52 cannot directly export to DVD, one first has to create some AVI, and in a second step use a programm such as DVD creator.

Would you recommend to first create an AVI file, and then use DVD creator OR DVD architect for creating the DVD itself?

4. When creating the DVD, what do I have to think aboutin terms of settings?

Thanks a lot!! Michael

[antonsvideo]

step 1 is to update to 4.54 because 4.52 has several issues with sharpness and flicker in the D1 standard def world

then we talk again

[Petersen12]

this would explain a lot...

could you be a little more precise what "several isses" you mean?

or do you have any text which explains this?