Downconverting HD->SD PAR question

[Walter Biscardi]

[disciple1] “If I have footage that was shot on a Varicam in DVCPROHD-720p, the PAR is 1.33. If I downconvert this to fit onto a regular 16/9 codec such as DV NTSC, that has a different PAR, won’t things look squashed? Is there a way to avoid this?”

FCP takes care of this for you automatically using the Distort function. If you drop the 720p material into a DV timeline, you’ll get an automatic letterbox resizing of the footage. From that, you can reset it to whatever framing you want.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Thanks
I was actually using DV NTSC as an example. My final output will be Digitbeta or BetaSp (not sure yet), so I will be creating a 8bit uncompressed timeline at the end of my project to export the baby.
So I’m glad FCP will do that…I tried a simple export using QuickTime from DVCPRO HD to DV NTSC Widescreen, and there was some very visible squeezing…

Thanks
Alex

[Chris Borjis]

I’ve been testing a number of downconversion techniques from
HD to SD and I have found that nesting your HD sequence into an
uncompressed 10 or 8-bit SD sequence, then exporting to compressor
yields the highest quality.