Very confused about what to set my FCPro project to with 720p/25pn

[Bret Williams]

Look- when many of us started using FCP 10 years ago, it was pretty much a DV only app, or compressed CCIR SD (486i) if you had a targa card. You still had a large array of settings. Deck control, seq size, upper/lower field, frame rate, codec, pixel aspect, audio rate, etc. Basically the specs of your media. With only a couple types of SD media, there wasn’t much to change, and we still forgot. It wasn’t brain surgery, just a lot of settings. Nothing special to LEARN, just knowledge of the media you’re shooting, and setup the sequence that way. Perhaps you don’t realize that the sequence IS the project settings. Project settings are just determining the settings for any new sequences created. If you want to set up the settings by hand it is simply a matter of going through all the tabs and options and choosing the right frame rates, pixel aspects, codec, etc. As many have mentioned, that practice has been abandoned. Instead of there being a couple flavors of sd, we now have a plethora of different flavors of HD, SD, codecs, frame rates, aspects, etc depending on the camera and format. So feel free to explore all the nuances of all the settings. They’re there, and the intricacies are too much to delve into.

What you should LEARN that no one mentions, is what codec to choose. In your project setup, some things are obvious- HD, 720p, 29.97, etc. You should choose an easy setup that matches your footage, and if applicable, your video card (Aja, matrox, etc). You can choose to work in the native codec you shot- DVCPROHD ( not DVCPRO 50, you didnt shoot that- that’s SD) or a more robust codec with a full HD aspect. DVCProHD is anamorphic in nature ( though never labelled that way ) in that it is 960x 720 instead of 1280x 720. It has to be stretched horizontally to fill 16:9. And if you edit in that format, your graphics will be compromised in the same way with pretty obvious stairstepping. You’d be better off working in ProRes 422 1280×720 so that graphics and effects added will benefit from the less lossy codec, and full aspect of 1280x 720. That’s the kind of basic knowledge we’re working with. Not the tiny intricacies of each format in the settings. We all use easy setups and presets. Me, I don’t use the AUTO sequence setup because, for example, in your case it would have chosen DVCPROHD 720p instead of ProRes 422 720p. The exception being if you were outputting to DVCProHD tape. In which case all pro res and 1280 would all be pointless- because it would get recompressed to 960 and DVCProHD by the deck anyway.