HDV Footage on an SD Project

[Jon Barrie]

There is a function in prefs for clips to adopt “scale to frame”. This should leviate your time spent on resizing – however the is a PAR difference in DV 16:9 vs true 16:9 so you will see some letterboxing when you use the “scale to frame” function.

The prefs for it only kick in after it’s activated and then clips are imported. Luckily you can select all clips in the timeline and right click on one, set the “scale to frame” function and it will address all selected
clips together.

If you want to control the scale and paste it across (or any effects/clip property combo) you can select the motion property name in the effect controls panel (to select more than one property group or effect hold cmd key – ctl for PC, and select to make multi selections) then select the hidden options list (looks like a small triangle in top right of panel) and select save preset… Name it. OK it. Whatever was part of that selection is now a single preset I. The effects panel and can be dragged over a group selection. Great for applying grades across a big selection.

If you are having issues with playbak performance it may be a hard drive issue. Are you working all on the OS drive? Or do u hve media on a separate drive (not partition) either ext or internal? USB 2 is not a good option for ext video playback. You will also need to use 7200rpm drives for decent playback.

RAID 0 or RAID 5 is recommended when working with HD.

Cheers, Jon Barrie

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net
http://www.suiteskills.com

[Jonathan Clauson]

hey Jon,

Thanks for the tips. I will try them when I get back to my rig and let you know how it works.

My final output is SD so I am not editing in HD, but the client shoots in HD against LED green screen so I key it in HD to take advantage of the extra resolution before I pop it in the timeline. My sequence is 4:3 NTSC as the station I send my DVCAM tape to doesn’t like anamorphic and wants everything 4:3 so if there are black bars it isn’t a big deal.

I also have the GTX 285 card to help offload some of the work from the processor and it has worked great, but I couldn’t figure out why the scaling was giving me such a fit.

I have a 2TB internal Hitachi 7200 drive which is dedicated for FCP/Adobe and the OS is on another internal. If I start editing or get more clients I will look into an external RAID solution, but right now I maxed myself out getting the tower last week and the Adobe suite so it will be a while before I can drop the $ on a RAID rig. I need a new VTR deck and AJA card before I go there as well. So much for paying off student loans. 🙂

[Jonathan Clauson]

Hey Jon,

It worked fine but then I realized Adobe does things a bit differently.

Here is the master clip I am working on (I am not involved in ANY aspect of the actual shooting) and you can see what happens when I use the scale to feature option. I get the garbage on screen left and the subject doesn’t fill the frame. This is totally fine as I can just enlarge it to where i need it……I thought.

Now here is where the difference comes in. FCP could resize the HDV footage down to 33.3% or thereabout and it would be fine. I would have room to enlarge it back so that the subject fills the frame and the garbage is hidden.

With Premiere I noticed that the scale was at 100% after the scaling option and when I enlarged it to hide the garbage and fill the frame, my subject got all pixilated and it wasn’t good. 🙁

So I guess that is one thing I am going to have to live with is the jittery playback in order to preserve the higher resolution so I can play with size and scale. Now I don’t mind rendering this short 1 min sequences so I can get smooth playback, I just have to figure out how to do that now as well. haha.

– Jonathan