-
working with mixed resolutions
I haven’t really had to deal with it before, so sorry if it sounds stupid or if the questions been asked, Please forgive me.
If you are working with SD and HD materials which do you master to ?
The client requested a version for dvd SD, and for their website 480x I forget the other number, lol.
The footage is split roughly 50-50, HD and SD. The HD is 1080i at 16×9 and the SD is a fake 16×9 SD.
I say fake because to my knowledge you cant get 16×9 unless its hd. The res on that SD footage looks soft compared to the 1080i. It looks like the camera it was shot with placed a matte or mask on the image to create a 16×9 letterbox look. Still SD though.
The good news for me was I placed the sd 16×9 on the timeline 1st so FCP adjusted the HD footage for me. I just needed to tweak the letter box look slightly to match each other.
So now that I’m done editing this project for the client which resolution would give me the best results to avoid aliasing and artifacts ?
I’m thinking 720p settings would be the closest thing to SD footage.
I saw a post on the site where Walter responded to a similar post, I’m not sure If we are talking about the same issue though.
From the other post.
“How do I create a Standard DVD from an HD Project?From your finished HD timeline:File > Export > Quicktime Movie.
Leave it set to “Current Settings”
You can export a Reference movie if you’d like, meaning leave “Make Self Contained Movie” UNchecked.
Take that Quicktime movie into Compressor.
Choose the DVD Compression of your choice, such as DVD 90 Minutes
High Quality. Compressor will create a Standard Definition 16:9
MPEG-2.Also select the Dolby Digital Audio to create the AC-3 audio file.
Launch DVD Studio Pro and bring the MPEG-2 and AC-3 into your project.
Now create a DVD!
DVD Studio Pro will create a DVD in 16:9 widescreen format that
will automatically play Letterboxed on a 4:3 TV and full screen on a
16:9 widescreen.Cool, huh? ”
It sounds similar, not sure if it will solve my problem. I will give this a shot 1st, if anybody has another suggestion please post it, I’m trying to come up with the best looking picture possible.
Thanks
-
3 Replies
-
I’m not an expert on this, nor close, but I have been in the same exact situation and seen it through until the end. I noticed two options, take the HD down to SD or upres (using InstantHD) the SD to HD. That soft Matte look you spoke of won’t go away if you upres the video, but it will look better then stretching the image and getting blocky artifacts.
Since my final project was going to be dumped down to a SD DVD I decided to take the HD to SD (It throws off the audience when it jumps back an fourth between the noticeable quality differences. But when editing (I hope someone will tell me the right way), I edited all of the footage in an a DV sequence with HD footage in it. (While editing) the HD footage looked odd because final cut pro had to squeeze it, but after I ran the final documentary through Compressor’s Best DVD settings, it look great and the average viewer couldn’t tell the difference between the HD footage vs. SD.I hope this helps, not an expert way of doing it, but I didn’t mind the extra rending time (minor) while editing all of the footage together. I’m sure you could even setup proxies in a such a method, but even with over 60+hours of captured footage I never had a problem.
-
Thanks Cornelius. I just tried the settings from another post that I attached. The text on screen looks like it is jagged when I compressed it and dragged it into DVD pro. I will try using 720p hd settings and see if that works instead.
-
I shoot everything in HD, but deliver almost everything in SD for DVD or Internet. Editing HD material in an SD timeline (using NTSC DV 3:2 settings) gives you a lot of flexibility. Since HD is so much larger than HD, you can easily crop, zoom, or otherwise select just the best parts of your HD material for the SD delivery. Using the Motion tab in FCP, if you set your Scale to about 50%, it uses almost all of the HD frame. But you can also set your scale up to 100% without losing any resolution, which gives the ability to “crop” the frame by changing the “Center” setting. You can even keyframe the Scale from 50% to 100% to give a zoom motion to an otherwise static shot. Keyframe the Center setting and you can pan in an otherwise static shot.
As an editor, editing HD material in an SD timeline gives you a huge number of options that you can’t get if you edit HD in an HD timeline and then down-rez later. And the results of using HD material directly in an SD timeline look great.
Good luck with your project.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up