Transcoding

[Don Greening]

“however I’m planning on buying a 4K projector and would like my video to play at that quality] “

You actually mean “play at that format” and not “play at that quality”, right?

Welcome to Creative COW, Aliya.

So, you need to up-convert your cell phone and Macbook Pro camera movies to HD. You’re actually doing it right by creating an HD timeline first and then dragging the standard def stuff in afterwards. Once your edit is complete it’s just a simple matter of rendering the timeline and you’ll be ready to export a completed movie of your project. Your SD clips will be converted to HD during the rendering process. Make sure your HD stuff is displaying at the correct field order if it’s interlaced material and that the standard def stuff is also displaying properly at the correct field order. Most of the time FCP recognizes the different formats and displays everything correctly but just check to make sure. You can do this by going to the Browser window and checking the field order for each of your clips in the Field Dominance column. Clips that display the incorrect field order look awful.

“What i want to know is, is there a way that i can actually upgrade the quality of the videos to HD, as in “convert” all my videos to HD quality [or to the highest possible quality like 2K] before even beginning to edit in FCP? “

The short answer is no. It’s generally accepted that you can never improve on the original source material, otherwise video people would all be running around with video cell phones and upconverting with software afterwards. Sure would save on equipment costs, but alas……

Taking a small frame size like standard definition and spreading it out over a much larger frame size only adds to the poor quality issue. But you have to work with what you’ve got, so highlight a piece of your SD footage in the timeline and render it, which will create a new HD file. The rendered file may look a little better.

Sorry for sounding like such a big fat pessimist here but the expression “garbage in garbage out” still applies.

– Don

[David Roth weiss]

[Don Greening] “Sorry for sounding like such a big fat pessimist here but the expression “garbage in garbage out” still applies.”

Don,

You’re a realist, not a pessimist.

The only thing I would add to what you wrote is that uprezing using one of Compressor’s Advanced Format Conversion presets is probably the best way to upres in the FCS suite of apps.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Aliya Ayyildiz]

Thanks guys, that makes sense.
David, can i ask you how “uprezing using one of Compressor’s Advanced Format Conversion presets” can be achieved or should i be checking out another forum for this..

[Don Greening]

You can stay right here if you want and David will give you a good answer. I think he just went to the bathroom for a few minutes 🙂

He’ll probably tell you how to convert everything to Apple’s Pro Rez codec but I don’t want to put words in his mouth. Oops. Too late.

– Don

[David Roth weiss]

“can i ask you how “uprezing using one of Compressor’s Advanced Format Conversion presets” can be achieved or should i be checking out another forum for this..”

Don knows the answer, but for some reason he wanted to make you wait for me Aliya, meanwhile getting in some bathroom humor at the same time. Feel free to give him some shit on both accounts.

Meanwhile, if you look through all the presets in Compressor, you will find that one of the directories is labled Advanced Format Conversions. In there you will see both HD and SD presets that have been configured by the kind folks at Apple with lots of great settings already for us to make really good conversions. The settings can also be changed by the user if necessary, but usually you will find what you need preconfigured and ready to rumble. Try them out, I think you’ll find they’ll do a great job for you.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Aliya Ayyildiz]

Thanks so much for the info, regarding the format conversion of course 🙂
I’ll be on it as soon as i have my son asleep, and maybe then i’ll bother you guys some more [or perhaps i’ll just bother Don!]
🙂

[Jackie Brown]

Thanks David

If I have footage including various different resolutions – SD, 1270 X 720 and HD, can I subject the whole lot to the compressor HD pre-set at once, or should I do them individually?

Thanks

Shandy