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Editing in 1080p Vs. NTSC Standard
I have the Panasonic AG-HMC 150 and I’m shooting my video in 1080p. They are videos for the web so there is no ‘standard’ I have to follow. I would like to know the advantages of editing the footage on a 1080p sequence opposed to a NTSC Standard or Widescreen sequence. I know it’s 1920×1080 to 720×480, does that translate to a higher quality finished product(QT, WMV, AVI, etc.)?
Also, would editing 1080i footage on a 1080p sequence create problems? I am shooting some dramitizations that require me to slow down the footage and I’m shooting those on 1080i, but the interviews I’m shooting on 1080p. Am I doing the right thing here?Thanks,
Bobby S. -
5 Replies
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Hi Bobby,
Since you are going to the web which will be progressive then editing progressive should prevent no problems. When deciding whether or not to use a DV NTSC timeline or a 1080 timeline keep in mind that in the 720×480 you will be able to adjust the framing of your 1080 footage since the frame size is so much larger.Jake Williams
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Thanks for the timely response on my question Jake. The reason you mentioned is the biggest reason I would edit on the 720×480 sequence, so I can have more play with a shot that I need to scale up in size, because I don’t need the whole framing. I was just concerned that I would lose quality in my finished product if that was the case.
Is there a difference quality-wise if I scale up the 1920×1280 image as opposed to having a 75% scaled shot on a 720×480 sequence?Thanks again,
Bobby S. -
Hi Bobby,
You will lose quality every time you zoom in. There will be a sweet spot for every shot. The overall loss of quality will be minimal and you shouldn’t be too concerned about it when considering the gain in versatility. If it looks good in your program monitor at 100% (more accurate than fit) then it will look good in your export. If you are going to use still frames I would suggest making the still frame, creating an HD seq to use for exporting and export a tiff of the frame at native resolution then rescaling back down for the 720 timeline. This will save you a lot of headaches with stability as the project grows.
Jake Williams
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THe biggest reason for Sequence settings matching the resolution of the source video is real time preview. Editing HD video is tough enough on a computer, but resizing HD to SD on the fly will make a smooth preview impossible.
Edit in the correct sequence settings and then nest that sequence in a NTSC sequence and scale, pan/scan as needed. -
Hi Bobby,
Keep in mind that if you want to reframe (pan/zoom) the HD video in an SD sequence, right-click the clip on the timeline and uncheck “scale to frame”. That way, the “raw” HD clip will be displayed, so that you are only seeing the center of the HD clip in your SD view. Now if you use Motion to change the scale to see more of the clip, it will utilize the extra data from the HD image. If the image is already “scaled to frame” to fit the SD frame, THEN you zoom in, you’ve lost that extra quality and it’s as if you are zooming into an SD clip, with the resulting quality loss.
Hope that makes sense.
Regarding the 1080p vs. 1080i – another option would be to just shoot it all 1080i, then apply “Deinterlace” in the Export dialog to get the right look for the web, rather than mixing interlaced and progressive footage during editing.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor
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