• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Mixing HD and SD (HDSLR with iphone 3GS)

  Posted by Eve Richer on October 13, 2010 at 10:33 am

  Hi everyone,

  I am using FCP 7 and have been shooting HD with a DSLR (Canon T2i). I am now trying to edit a video combining this HD footage with some videos from my friend’s iphone 3GS. Any suggestions regarding workflow?

  With the Canon T2i I shot 1080p 30 fps and the iphone seems to shoot 640 x 480 30 fps. I did a little experimenting trying to transcode both into Apple ProRes LT but so far one type of footage always needs to be rendered on the timeline which gets messy.

  I am also wondering:

  What is the best way to deal with the different aspect ratios?
  Should I upconvert the SD or downconvert the HD?
  What is the best codec to use?

  I am editing on a Macbook Pro and final output is intended for the web (e.g. Youtube, Facebook…)

  Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
  Eve

  Trevor Ward replied 15 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Trevor Ward

  October 13, 2010 at 1:55 pm

  Here’s what I would do:

  1. Continue like you have in terms of transcoding everything into a ProRes format. LT is fine, especially since your final delivery is web.
  2. Create a timeline that is the native codec of your HD footage (1080p30 ProRes LT). Go ahead and drop your SD ProRes clips from the iPhone into the timeline.
  3. Using the motion tab, scale the SD footage up to fill your screen (You can either fill to full width, thereby cropping some portion of the top and the bottom of your footage. Or you can scale to height, thereby leaving black bars on left and right side of screen. personal preference there. When you scale full width, the two downsides are that you crop top and bottom, and the scale factor increase, thereby increasing the fuzziness of your image.)

  As far as upconverting, my own experience with trial and error is that just using the scale in the motion tab produces good results. Some filters do it, but I found some of them to do a inferior job. Make it easy on yourself.

  -trevor ward
  Red Eye Film Co.
  http://www.redeyefilmco.com
  orlando, fl
• 

  Eve Richer

  October 18, 2010 at 9:27 am

  Hi Trevor,

  Thanks for your reply. I decided to go with your approach, though I found that the iphone footage didn’t need to scaled up with the motion tab since it already filled up the whole screen (except the pillarboxed part on the sides). I still have to render the iphone footage on the timeline, but I decided to live with that since the final product will only be a couple minutes total. I’m not sure if this has to do with the way I transcoded it (in MPEG Streamclip), but regardless I figured I’d just share my experience in case anyone else is in a similar situation.

  Best,
  Eve
• 

  Trevor Ward

  October 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm

  Great!

  The reason why you didn’t need to scale up the video in the motion tab is that FCP kind of did that for you automatically, I’d bet. Look in the tab and check to see what scale factor it is. I bet it’s more than 100%.

  You still needed to render unless you transcoded into the same codec as your timeline. Especially if you left it as a H.264 file. FCP doesn’t like H.264 files, whether they be .mov or .mp4.

  As long as you found a workflow that works for you and gives you the results you were looking for.

  -trevor ward
  Red Eye Film Co.
  http://www.redeyefilmco.com
  orlando, fl

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