HD video writing

Question

I have a Panasonic HD camcorder with which the Macbook Pro editng programme works fine. However the DVD burner produces comparatively poor quality discs. The camcorder came with an HD Writer disc only for Windows (Apparently Panasonic don't do one for Mac).. Can I transfer the edited video from the Mac to my PC for writing? OR do I have to buy an HD write programme for the Mac and if so what programme would that be?
I'd very much appreciate help with this. Thanks

Answer 1

I think there's a basic misunderstanding of digital video and of the Panasonic software. The HD Writer software from Panasonic is simply used to copy the HD video to and form the camera. I believe it can also convert it into a couple of alternate formats (which you want to avoid conversion as much as possible).
Also, the DVD drive is not relevant to the quality of the video. DVD video is DVD video.
I'm assuming that what you did was edit your video on the computer, then do something like "Export to iDVD" or similar to create a video DVD. This is the correct thing to do to create a standard-definition version of a video playable in a standard (not-connected-to-a-computer) DVD player. Video DVD is fundamentally a standard-definition format. It's 480i resolution. The format doesn't support high-definition and that has nothing to do with the operating system or DVD burner used. To go from your source video to DVD video, the video stream has to be scaled to 16% of it's original size, and the square pixels of the source video are converted to rectangular pixels that are about 18% wider than they are tall. This conversion is where you are seeing the loss in quality and there's not too much you can do about it and still end up with a disc that will play in a commodity video DVD player.
On the other hand, perhaps this is not what you want. If the video is short enough (AVCHD is typically 3-8 GB/hour, a single-layer DVD is 4.7 GB), you can create a data DVD with a high-definition video file on it. This will only be readable by computers, not typical consumer video DVD players, but perhaps it's what you want. In that case, rather than use iDVD (or Toast, or whatever) to create a video DVD, you simply use your movie software (iMovie) to export the video as a QuickTime movie.
If you do that, select the custom settings and use the resolution (1920x1080) and frame rate (in your case 50fps) of the original file with automatic keyframes and the h.264 profile (or baseline, if you know that you will be later using some other software that requires it). For best quality, check the two-pass option. Once you have your video file, create a burn-folder on the desktop (in Finder, File > New Burn Folder...), drop the file in there, open the folder, and click the "Burn to disk" button in the upper-right corner.
If you really want to create a high-definition video playable on a high-definition video player (e.g., not a computer), then you need to purchase a Blu-Ray Disc writer (BD-R) and the necessary software to master Blu-Ray discs. Toast 10 for OS X can do this if you purchase and external BD-R drive.