HD and PI3

[Greg Flowers]

I cannot speak about Premiere as I use Vegas but I am able to import 1080i Cineform NTSC footage from my FX1 with the standalone Connect HD program. I wouldn’t suggest you use 1440×1080 1.333 pixel aspect ratio (PAR)footage anyway as your end result will be quite stretched out. Particleillusion converts everything to 1.0 PAR. Even if you were able to import native or Cineform HDV footage it would be stretched vertically, making everthing tall and skinny looking. My own personal workaround for this is to render the HDV footage from Vegas as either 1920×1080 or 960×540 res avi with 1.0 PAR. This way Particleillusion will not stretch the footage. I use uncompressed or Huffy codecs unless I need to bring an alpha channel with it, in which case I use a PNG or TIF sequence. I then import the footage as my background and go from there. When I am ready to render, I usually turn off my background, render as a PNG or TIF sequence making sure to check “save alpha.” I composite the PNG or TIF sequence in After Effects or simply Vegas on top of the original HDV footage. It will fit perfectly in a 1920×1080 1.0 PAR comp or 1440×1080 1.333 PAR comp. If I rendered as 960×540 I scale vertically and horizontally by a factor of two. Vegas does all of the scaling automatically. I hope this helps some.

[Alan Mills]

Interesting stuff. So you’ve purchased a seperate Cineform product and have no issues. Sounds like the extra purchase is certainly necessary then.

I’m just tryting to cut a corner here I guess. I need to identify some play time and download the 14 day trial version and see if it solves the problem.

Thanks for the input.