best way to get 720p to SD?

[Matrox_tm_chris Ellis]

The way to do this would be to first load up your FCP timeline in 720P with the MXO2. Under View–>Video Playback make sure that you choose a Matrox MXO2 720P setting either at 8 or 10 bit. The next step is to open the MXO2 control panel and take a look under the video output tab. From here you can choose to downscale all the outputs of the MXO2 by setting the Main channel to SD. You can also choose to downscale the analog and SDI outputs independently. On this same page you can also choose if you want to letterbox, center cut or just leave it anamorphic. Once you have set these options when you playback your 720P timeline in FCP you should now get a great quality downscale on your output.

Hope this helps,

Chris.

[Andy Nitchman]

Tom,

I will try your method but it seems to me that it would be better to have 1 HD pixel represent 1 SD pixel meaning having a 720p clip set to 100% in a SD timeline then to stretch a clip forcing FCP to make 1 pixel into many pixels. Unless for some reason FCP handles upresing better then it does rendering HD pixels as SD pixels.

“you’ll be putting 720 pixels into 720” No don’t think so. the matrox will still be scaling 1280 down to 720. A rendered 1280×720 clip at 178% will still be treated by the matrox as a 1280×720 clip right? your logic suggests that a 720p clip at 178% would be seen by the matrox as a 227840×128160 clip.

[Tom Brooks]

I’m just sayin’ that you can blow up the 720 shot at the beginning (in the 720 timeline) or at the end (in the 480 timeline) and the end result is the same magnification either way. There could be differences in the way artifacts are created or handled, however.