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Preserving Resolution: Manually scale down footage in smaller sequence vs Maximum Render Quality
(As a preface, I *have* searched for an answer to this for quite a while, but can never get exactly what I’m looking for…so, first post. If I missed the answer somewhere, I apologize.)
Okay, I’ve read and watched quite a bit about the preference ‘Scale to Frame Size’ and how it doesn’t preserve resolution when downscaling larger video. Therefore, if I want to finish at a lower resolution than my original media (for instance, 720p from 1080p or something), can someone tell me the better of the two following options?
1) Drop all 1080p footage in a 720p sequence and manually scale down. Edit in said sequence, including any stabilizing of shots and/or punching in using extra resolution for reframing without losing native quality. I saw this technique used by Rich Harrington in a Lynda course for editors migrating from FCP7 to Premiere CS5.5.
OR
2) Drop all 1080p footage into a sequence matching the footage settings, still stabilizing shots as necessary. Then exporting as 720p and checking ‘Maximum Render Quality’.
The second is much easier, but I’m afraid of quality loss due to this method. I know I can preserve quality with Option 1, but can someone advise as to Option 2? If you can’t use ‘Maximum Render Quality’ in that way, what is it there for?
As a second question on the side, would exporting with ‘Maximum Render Quality’ cancel out the resolution loss of ‘Scale to Frame Size’ since it’s supposed to make Premiere use the original media resolution..right? This is more of a curiosity to me…it’s less important than the former question.
Thanks to anyone who has the answer.
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1 Reply
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I have the exact same question as you do about resizing my footage. I was bummed to see that apparently no one has responded to this post and am wondering if you’ve had any more insight about this issue since you posted? I’m currently running my footage through Adobe Media Encoder and don’t really see an option to keep the format and all the other information/settings exactly the same, and to simply adjust the resolution, so I got as close to that as possible, but don’t have results to report yet.
Any new thoughts/ideas?
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