Interpreting Footage in Premiere CC

[Zach Greenwood]

PS I was just thinking about this, and perhaps I didn’t find the answer to my question because I am in fact a complete idiot…

BUT since I am scaling from 1080 to 720, I will have to lose part of the frame if I want to eliminate the black bars correct?

Do I have to manually scale and adjust each clip to fit how I want or is there a way for this to automatically happen?

I’m incredibly exhausted and tired right now, so apologies for rambling!

[Paul Esteves]

You will get the black bars because full HD on your 5D is 16:9 aspect Ration, whereas NTSC is 4:3. You could try export to NTSC widescreen. it will effectively be 864×480 (or something similar), but will still be considered NTSC and will author to a DVD fine. You will still get small thin black bars, but it’ll be a lot better. If you MUST fill the frame, you’ll have to crop your image. If you don’t want to manually do this, create a new sequence with NTSC 720×480 and copy and paste your timeline from your original sequence into your new timeline. Now your video will be cropped.

[Jon Doughtie]

Hi Zach. The “interpret footage” option is there primarily for telling Premiere what kind of footage you have, rather than what kind you want. It goes back to the days when folks would transfer from the camera into the system, and Premiere would auto-detect the format. For other import methods, you used “interpret footage” to tell Premiere what format footage you were importing.

For your project, you may wish to run it through Media Encoder and convert it to NTSC WS. Then edit and finish with that converted footage files.

[Zach Greenwood]

Ah ok, thanks Jon! That makes more sense 🙂

Two more questions:

Will one method affect the quality more than the other? AND how do you deal with exporting 1080 and 720 footage simultaneously for clients without having to go in and adjust each scene to fit the frame?

[Peter Hansen]

Why not edit the material in it’s native resolution?

When you’re finished just create a new Sequence with the settings you wish (NTSC) and drop your edited sequence into that newly created one. Scale the picture down a bit and your good to go. At least this is how I would do it.

BTW: Please don’t use 720 to describe NTSC (720×480) footage (480i would be the correct term), because some people might think you mean 720p which is 1280×720.

[Zach Greenwood]

Thanks peter! This seems to be the best solution. Yes, I mean 480i not 720p. Sorry for the confusion. I need to read up more on all of this.

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Zach,

I think this thread gotten off point.

First, NTSC can certainly be widescreen, not sure why 4:3 keeps entering the discussion. NTSC DVD is always 720×480 regardless of being 4:3 or 16:9, only the Pixel Aspect Ratio changes (864×480 with 1.0 PAR is correct for web viewing though).

Next, why does the client want the DVD as 29.97? You CAN make an NTSC DVD using 23.976 progressive, which would match the frame rate of the original footage, avoiding any consequences of changing the frame rate.

Edit the footage in a 1080p 23.976 sequence, then Export to “MPEG-2 DVD” and use the “NTSC 23.976p Wide” preset. Above the output preview, change “Source Scaling” to “Scale to Fill” to eliminate the narrow black pillar boxing on the sides. Check the box in AME for “Max Render Quality”, as that helps with the downscaling.

If the client absolutely must have a DVD as 29.97, still edit the footage natively as 1080p 23.976, and when exporting to MPEG-2 DVD, choose “NTSC Widescreen Progressive”, which is 29.97. But staying with the 24p will look best.

Hope this gets you dialed in. Do NOT use “Interpret Footage”, as already mentioned. If you have that enabled, put it back the way it was, you do not want/need that applied in this case and it will cause problems.

Thank you

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Steve Brame]

I was so ashamed of my post, I deleted it.

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Steve Brame
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[Soumendra Jena]

Here is what I do :

We always shoot at 25fps 1080p IPB mode on the 5D Mark3.

We create timeline of same 25fps and finish the mp4 render with FUllHD or YouTube 1080p through Media Encoder.

Then I simply import the mp4 to ENCORE, select NTSC DVD DISC and burn it.

Thats does my DVD discs for clients, who dont have a Blu-Ray player.