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mixed HD and SD formats in same sequence – help!
I am editing a short documentary on FCP 6 and all of our original footage was shot DVCpro HD. But we also have a few old home movies to mix in and these were transferred from 8mm and VHS to miniDV. They were captured for me already so all I have are the 4:3 SD quicktimes.
The final output will just be a DVD, so it will be standard def.
Thus far I have been working in a sequence that matches the DVCpro HD format settings. But my SD footage is of course much smaller. And on top of that it is 4:3 while the sequence is 16:9, so I have to blow it up quite a bit to get it to fill the frame.
First of all, if I just go on working this way and then when I do my final output to SD, will it just all be sized down so that the “blowing up” of the SD footage I am now doing will be canceled out (so to speak) by the final downconvert? Or will it still look like crap? (It is coming from 8mm and VHS and this will never be broadcast or anything, so I can accept it looking fairly crappy but would rather not have it all pixellated.)
I tried changing my sequence settings to SD but then Final Cut wanted to render each HD clip just for playback. This will get very annoying very quickly, as it is the majority of my footage.
What is the best way to handle this?
Thank you!!!
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5 Replies
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People will differ on this, but when the majority is dvcpro hd, I edit in a dvcprohd seq. I actually have a SD monitor hooked up to a dvcam deck, and FCP does a great job of converting to dv on the fly for monitoring. I blow up the sd stuff in the hd seq.
When my final product is 16:9 DVD, I also have an anamorphic DV seq with the Hd seq nested within for testing. I switch back and forth to see the true final product on the sd monitor (switched to 16:9). So far the results have been great.
Don’t forget, you’re scaling up the SD, but on the downscale it’s not cancelling itself out. You still need to blow it up to fit 16:9.
That’s the setup for now. At the end of a project I have a DVCProHD master, and a DV 16:9 master. Results have been great.
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I would stay HD all the way to the end. Up convert your SD shots with Compressor (there’s some great tutorials here, do a search) or another program. This way you will have an HD master of the final show. You may be making a SD DVD at the end, but an HD master to make a Blu-Ray disk might come in handy.
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
I am sorry if this sounds dumb…. but will a 16:9 DVD play on a regular monitor? My client is an artist who just wants this little video for her own use. I was imagining it would be a 4:3 DVD perhaps letterboxed. In which case the 4:3 footage would be cropped. right?
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“but will a 16:9 DVD play on a regular monitor?”
The answer to your questions is yes. There are two ways to encode a DVD. If your footage/project is in 16:9, then you can encode the DVD anamorphic, which is squeezed. When it plays on a 4:3 monitor, it will be letter-boxed automatically. When played on a 16:9 widescreen monitor, it stretches out the image to fill the entire frame. You get better resolution. If your project is edited in 4:3, it will look fine on a 4:3 monitor, but will only fill the center of a 16:9 monitor, unless you switch the monitor to stretch/zoom which looks bad.
Do a search on ‘Anamorphic’ here on the cow. There is plenty of info and tutorials on the subject.
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Thank you. I did a search but didn’t find the tutorials or instructions. Can I do this in iDVD? Or do I need to use DVD Studio Pro? (I have never used DVD Studio Pro.)
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