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HD h.264 and DV in same sequence
Hi,
I’m editing a film using some old DV Pal footage and some new HD footage (from a 5D). What’s the best sequence settings for this? (I need to print the final film onto DV tape).
Tried starting with a DV Pal sequence but there is a slight drop in quality from the HD footage when I place it in the timeline. Is this OK?
The alternative is I import the DV Pal footage into an HD sequence instead, but how do I ensure the DV Pal stays interlaced?
Thanks in advance,
T
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3 Replies
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Since you are delivering on DV I would edit at the lower of the two resolutions, DV PAL. You can’t avoid some quality loss going from HD to SD. You may want to transcode your h.264 to an SD Apple Pro Ress format before you even start editing. Of course you are going to have some aspect ratio issues no matter what you do. Hopefully whoever shot the HD footage kept it 4×3 safe.
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Great, thanks Bill!
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Run the HD footage through Mpegstreamclip and let it scale it down to a DV file. It can crop the edges or you can go anamorphic. You didn’t say what kind of DV tape/file you need to go to. Even if your old DV is 4:3, you might want to go anamorphic (16:9) DV and add some sort of background to fill in the left and right of the 4:3 material. Or use a panoramic filter like the one Andy Mees made to selectively decide what parts of the image stay correct, and what parts get stretchced to fill the 16:9 space.
Alternatively, I’d really recommend you do everything at pro res 422 HD since you do have HD content. FCP will upscale the DV stuff alright, especially since you’re going to shrink it back down for master. But run the h264 through mpegstreamclip to make it pro res 422 (or log and capture with canon plug-in). If you have HD content, we’re living in an HD world. It’s easier to downscale than to have a client come back and say, hey, can we output a blu ray or HD web video now?
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