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Mixing HDV and SD footage, up or down scale?
As you will understand from this post, I am somewhat of a newb when it comes to this. I had three shots I was editing for a few concerts I filmed. 1 camera filmed in HDV (resolution 1440×1080 – from memory, that may be slightly wrong, I’m in work!) and 2 cameras filmed in SD (720 x 576 I believe) – the films are both PAL and shot with a 16:9 ratio. I recently finished the edits and exported (export>quicktime movie (not conversion) and presumed this would give me my uncompressed edit which I could make a DVD from. However when looking at the info of each file it appears I have made a mistake somewhere – some files have a res of 1440×1080 and some 720×576 – I figure this is because I have dragged the files into fcp timeline randomly and when it asks if I want to adjust the film to match the clip settings I’ve said yes. I guess in some I dragged the hdv file in first and made the whole thing 1440… and in others I dragged the SD files in first and made the whole thing 720…
My questions are as follows:
1) The files that state 1440 – have I reencoded the 720 SD footage up to 1440? If so would it be better to ‘downscale’ (so to speak) the 1440 footage to 720… I imagine I would get more a consistent picture but reducing 1 of the shots instead of making 2 of them (which are used way more often) bigger and likely increasing pixelation?2) If I open my project up again (still saved fortunately) how do I adjust the end project so it’s at 720… instead of 1440… Can anyone give me a quick guide to this as I’m not sure where this particular setting is.
I guess my biggest problem is that when I exported I didn’t expect it to reencode anything but looking back it seems more obvious now.
Thanks for reading
Michael -
3 Replies
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Edit in 2 cameras filmed in SD (720 x 576 I believe) – the films are both PAL
Take all the footage shot on HDV and run them trhu “Compressor” b/4 bringing them into edit. Convert them to SD (720 x 576 – then import them into your SD edit.
Edit SD WS.
Export “Current Settings”
Compress file for DVD/WEB/DeliveryChris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC -
Yikes, that is not good news for someone who has spent 2 months editing to hear! This is an amateur project and I’ve just compressed the exported files to mpeg2 for dvd so I’m gonna burn a disc and see if it looks alright. I know it won’t look perfect but hopefully it’ll be ok – signs so far are promising that it’ll be alright. I’ll know in future to compress all my video to the same specs before editing. I may even redo this project at a later date if I find myself with lots of spare time, to compare the difference if nothing else.
Thanks for your time
Michael -
If anything, you can convert the HDV footage down in Compressor and simply re-link the FCP file to the newly downconverted video files. Everything should still be edited, you’re just telling Final Cut to look at the new lower-quality files as opposed to the original HDV ones.
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