-
HDV on SD timeline?
I just finished shooting 15 interviews for a documentary I am working on. All of the interviews were shot on a Sony HDR FX1 in 1080i. I am not quite sure how I want to go about editing this. I recently just helped on a shoot for a 30 second commercial that will be aired over cable for a school district. They were shooting in HD but were planning on editing on a 4:3 timeline. So while shooting they compensated for the lost width in all of their shots.
I thought this might be a great way to edit my documentary since I will be using a lot of archival footage and old photographs and my final product would be SD rather than HD.
How would I go about doing this in FCP Studio 2? I have captured in all of my footage but when I drag it down to a 4:3 timeline it comes in at 50% and has the letterbox bars at the top and bottom. When I go to blow this up to 100% the image seems to be a little muddy and blurry. It does not look as crisp as I would like it to.
I h ear a lot of people talk about “Converting your HD footage to SD” is there an actual conversion process I should be doing before editing HDV in SD? Or should I just capture as HDV and bring it into an SD 4:3 Timeline?
What are your recommendations? Should I edit this on a 4:3 SD timeline? Or should I edit this in HDV 16:9 and just deal with the little bars that I get on each side when using archival 4:3 footage?
I am weary of editing in 16:9 because I really don’t want this to come out letterboxed on regular 4:3 TVs.
Any input and advice would be greatly appreciated.
-
5 Replies
-
Drop your HDV stuff into a 4:3 SD sequence. FCP will automatically scale the footage so that everything fits into the 4:3 window but this creates the letterboxing you don’t want. So double click on the first clip in your sequence to load it into the viewer and scale it until the letterboxing is gone. This will also crop the sides, giving you a 4:3 version of your 16:9 footage. Now de-select the first clip in your sequence, select/highlight all the others and paste the first clip’s attributes onto the others. That should set up all the other clips with the same scaling as the first one. Make sure you do all this before you render anything.
– Don
-
Awesome! I got it to work. But my HD footage seems to not look as good as it does in a 16:9 HD timeline… Any ideas?
-
Well it won’t look any good until you render because in order to play back unrendered footage FCP will drop the quality instead of dropping frames. Plus the fact that the field order of SD footage is lower first and HDV is upper first may also have something to do with it. Check one of the clip’s properties in the viewer and you’ll see that HDV footage shows as “Upper First” in the field order column. Render a test piece and check the result on a broadcast monitor or at least a television.
– Don
-
[Andrew COnner] “But my HD footage seems to not look as good as it does in a 16:9 HD timeline… Any ideas?”
Less lines of resolution. Of course your HD footage won’t look as good in an SD timeline…and worse if it is a DV timeline. You are reducing the resolution of your image.
And yes…you must render first…fully. No green anywhere. Purple.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
http://www.LFHD.net
Read my blog! -
As Don and Shane says, HDV will work fine in SD.
I would recommend you set your sequence as 8b Unc. Shift-fields is ot an issue anymore when lying Hd over an SD time-line.
I would recommend you make your final rendering in 10b unc or Proress HD. Set “Render all YUV in High Precission” and Moion Render: BEST.
Overkilling? May be. But its works.
And if you can drop in your HDV footage the Nattress “Chroma Smoothing/Sharpening”, the best.Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up