HDV Footage from FCP to AE

[Kevin Camp]

hdv 1080i footage is actually 4:3 by pixel count (1440×1080 is a 4:3 ratio), but it employs a 1.33 pixel aspect ratio that ‘stretches’ the pixels to make the screen 16×9 (multiply 1440 by 1.33 and you get 1920).

this is the same way for sd… sd video is 720×480, which is a 3:2 ratio, but with a 0.9 pixel aspect ratio a 4:3 screen ratio is achieved.

you can toggle the pixel aspect ratio on and off in ae by hitting the little button at the bottom of the preview window that looks like a rectangle with a double arrow above it. note the rendered footage should look fine in qt or you nle.

you can also place the footage into a square pixel hd comp preset like ‘hdtv 1080 29.97’ and ae will properly handle the pixel aspect ratio conversion for you and fill the 1920×1080 frame, but you may need to import a little differently in your nle if it expects your render to be 1440×1080. (actually, i wouldn’t render to hdv codec from ae, so i doubt that the nle will any have problems with the rendered file).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

thanks dave, i should have started there…

you could most likely bypass the pixel aspect ratio thing, by exporting you hdv footage to a codec that does not use temporal compression, and, at that point try to ‘expand’ the footage to 1920×1080. since you are going through the trouble of exporting to another format anyway this isn’t a bad way to go.

good codecs/formats to use to avoid temporal compression are any sort of image sequence (tif, tga, psd, etc), any uncompressed codec (uncompressed avi, etc) and lossless mov (as long as you didn’t enable ‘keyframes’ which are temporal markers). those will all produce large files… if you need to conserve disk space photojpeg at high quality settings (85-95) is quite good.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Chuck Obernesser]

Thanks guys…. I gonna play with the footage a bit more…not sure my have to do the shoot with the Canon and just try to light the scene better. Just gonna have to play around some more.

Thanks

Chuck
Obernesser Productions
http://www.obernesserproductions.com

[Kevin Camp]

for the record, you’ve done nothing wrong with your hdv footage… if you tried to capture with another hd codec, you would end up with similar issues. most hd acquisition codecs do use a 1.33 pixel aspect ratio and temporal compression… you would need a very fast disk array to capture hd any other way.

we are not saying you did something wrong with your hdv, we’re just explaining the nature of hdv, some ways to work with it and some options on how to make it work better in after effects.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW