Scaling 1080p footage in 720p timeline

[T. Payton]

Set the spacial conform to “none”.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Imari Childress]

Thanks. I’ve done that and I still don’t understand what I’m seeing. I have a 1080p clip on a 720p timeline. Playback is set to use original media (1080p footage). When I set spatial conform to “none”, the clip’s size does not change in the viewer and the scale property of the clip still reads 100%. Is what I’m seeing a 1080 clip scaled down to fit a 720 timeline (which is not reflected in the scale property)? Still confused. I just want to know if – in spite of what the scale property says – that when I scale the clip to say, 130%, I’m really just scaling it up to its actual 1080 size. Does this question make sense? (I’ve even gone back to check my original source footage to be sure I shot at 1080p – and I did.)

thanks

[Jason Jenkins]

[Imari Childress] “My question is, with 1080p footage on the 720p timeline, do I have that 30% or so “headroom” to scale up the video without degrading it? …even though the clip info says, 130%, aren’t I just taking the video back up to 1080, which is a actually 100%? Very confusing. What is happening under the hood?!”

When the Spatial Conform is set to “None”, a scale setting of 100% represents all of the 1920×1080 resolution and scaling to 2/3’s of that (66.7%) will fit it into the 1280×720 frame. With the Spatial Conform set to “Fit”, a scale setting of 100% represents 2/3’s of the 1920×1080 resolution and scaling up to 150% represents all of the 1920×1080 resolution.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

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[Imari Childress]

Thanks so much. I had been reading your other related posts on this matter for days before I finally posted. I just found out why this was driving me nuts. I hope this is helpful to someone! This is what I learned: The spatial conform property does not affect a compound clip or a synchronized clip (a synchronized clip, I suppose, is also technically a compound clip). I tried setting spatial conform to “none” on an unsynchronized version of a clip and the image became over-sized in the view as it should. When I tried this with the same exact unsynchronized version of the clip, nothing happened. I also confirmed that spatial conform has no effect on regular compound clips either. What I had to do with the synchronized clips and the compound clips was to open the clip in its own timeline and set the spatial conform from there.

Another weird FCPx quirk. It’s especially odd, because you can change other properties (like scaling) to synchronized and compound clips. Another thing that needs a fix, imho. Especially for those of us that like to edit in a native resolution timeline then bump down to a smaller timeline for cropping, “fake” camera moves, etc…

thanks, again!

[Robert Mcgowan]

If anybody is still having problems with this spatial conforming issue
I have a work round –

I like working in a 720p timeline and use a lot of 1080p footage so it’s always great to be able to crop in and not loose any quality —

I have noticed that linked clips (above story line) don’t seem to have problems with the conform issue and if you go to the inspector and spatial conform selecting ‘none’ allows you to zoom in 100% no quality loss

However
I don’t seem to be able to do this on clips in the main storyline track –

So if you select the clip you want and then select Clip – Open in Timeline from the top menu
This will open another timeline you can select the clip again and apply ‘none’ to the spatial conform in the inspector menu –

Then go back to the edit time line you have been working in, by clicking the backwards arrow or just selecting the project again, you then then go back to the clip and apply which ever crop zoom you wish to apply –

It’s a pain in the ass, but it works, it would be a nightmare on a large project!
I hope that this eventually gets a fix and you can apply is easily as you can to a linked clip —