AVCHD edit in PE10 share to DVD or Blue Ray

Question

I am currently editing a project in AVCHD and plan on making DVD and BR discs.  Not all the people who want this footage have blue ray players or HD TVs.   The footage is of sporting events with lots of action and camera movement.    What I have found in doing many trial samples is the DVD quality is poor that PE10 produces when using AVCHD files.   I have done some limited editing with DV from an old camcorder in PE10 and it looks much better than the AVCHD rendered to a DVD disc.  Since the AVCHD files are much higher quality I was very disappointed that I can't get the same quality as an old camcorder that was mini DV.  After reading various forums and Steve Grisetti's book I have a work around but it seem crazy to go through all these steps.   Does this make sense?
Camera Cannon HFM 41 settings used are AVCHD  1440 x 1080 60i,  I have set the PE10 project settings at HD 1080i 30 (60).  After editing about 15 minutes of video, still pictures(which have been resized), with transitions, titles, etc.  PE10 seems to be doing the editing fine.
When taking through the Share process to DVD the quality is poor.
Steve has a work around in his book where I take the project  to a computer file and save it.  The setting is under the MPEG option and is : MPEG2  1440 X 1080i30.   This file looks good on the computer screen.
From here I take the file through "ANY Video Converter" to an AVI file.   I take this file and put it into a new PE10 project with DV settings of 720 x 480.   When I render this to a DVD the quality is OK, almost as good as other projects I have done starting with standard definition cameras.    Still a little disappointed that even the stills are quite as good.
This seems like a lot of work but I have tried dozens of different ways and the quality comes out very poor.   I have considered taking the files from the camera and converting to AVI before editing but then I can' t make a BR disc.
Is there a better way to take AVCHD to DVD and BR from one project?
There seems to be lots of opinions on which converters are the best, not sure if I selected the best one.

Answer 1

You should be shooting at 1920x10801 for Blue Ray otherwise you will get an unexpected loss of quality in trying to make your final BD.
1440 doesn't correspond to any horizontal TV size (usually 680,720,1366 or 1920)
The loss occurs because you cant fit in an exact pixel so a sharp video transition gets averaged around a few pixels immediatley halving the apparent resolution.
To see this at it's worst, set your computer adapter card to half the pixel resolution of your computer monitor and try to read fine text compared to when it is exactly the same.
This matching is why true full HD 1920 x 1080 observed on a true 1920x1080 big screen is so dramatically better than all others. (Few TV transmissions are true Full HD)
There is always a loss of some quality converting resolutions that are not an exact multiple of the final result.
You should also be cropping and converting all stills to 16x9 1900x1080 pixels (in Photoshop) before adding to the timeline
Because HD is so much better, HD camera dont need so much "high frequency" boost or sharpening as standard cameras did,
They are relatively soft at the point where the pixels cease in DVDs (about 640)
The HD sharpening (or crispening) is done at a much higher pixe setting setting in HD and this is completely wiped out when you convert to DVD.
The way to compensate is to sharpen the video to be downconverted at the 640 pixel part of the spectrum before converting which is what most standard def broadcast cameras always did to make them apparently sharp at that lower resolution (it was all done with mirrors!)
Obviously you only sharpen the file to be made to a DVD, not to the one for BD although you can often make up for a fuzzy original even in a BD!
See the difference only 10% makes?