Editing with differents formats, frame rates and resolutions

[Alan Stephens]

I would convert everything to the highest quality, least compression, codec in your settings and it should not loose quality. For instance us the ProRes 444 and adjust your frame rate to make your clips for editing.
If you upsample “or uncompress” your clips to uncompressed video for editing , there should be no loss in quality. Uncompressed video may be too taxing for your system so something like a high quality of ProRes
like ProRes HQ would still be fine. When you output you will likely deliver an recompressed format similar to where you started or even less for web output. So, go up, edit, then come back down.
The need for reencoding is only to standardize the frame rates, other wise you can edit the different formats on the same timeline with out a problem. Mixed frame rates can product image jitter.

Alan Stephens

Mac Book Pro 2.8, quad i7, 16 GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB, OS X ElCapitan 10.11.3
Thunderbolt 1 Promise raid drive

[Tim Kolb]

I would edit at 1280x720p 23.976fps…

The 1920×1080 can be scaled down.

I would take the 25 fps material and use ‘interpret footage’ to get it to play at 24 fps. The audio will pitch down by 4%…but depending on the material, it may not be a problem if there is no footage of the same people talking, etc on another clip that isn’t speed-converted.

The 29.97 material will run reasonably well on a 23.976 timeline with no adjustment…but check ‘frame blend’ by right-clicking the clip on the timeline to reduce the ‘gallop’ effect in the frame cadence if the action is causing to many motion artifacts.

While converting everything to a mezzanine format (like ProRes) seems like a good idea…and make no mistake, it would probably run easier that H264 material…it makes gargantuan files and if you aren’t using that step to do some kind of conversion beyond just creating massive files, you won’t gain much beyond a lot of data footprint on your drives.

PPro is designed to deal with mixed format material…you might as well use it if your machine has the power to handle the processing…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Video Producer at I-CAR