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XL-2 16:9 footage looses quality when converted to 4:3
We just got a new XL-2 and shot a project in 16:9. I captured the footage in FCP as DV-NTSC Anamorphic; edited the project; then, for final output for broadcast, created a new 4:3 non-anamorphic sequence and dropped the 16:9 sequence into the 4:3 sequence. The picture lost a very noticable amount of quality at that point. Is this inevitable when converting 16:9 anamorphic video to 4:3 for broadcast or is there a better way to edit it to avoid this problem?
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1 Reply
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Could you be more specific about what you mean when you say that the picture has lost quality? It could could just be that it’s the nature of the beast, since you are scaling down your image vertically. If you think about it, you’re actually downsizing the image from 720×480 to roughly 720×405, so you’ve lost 75 pixels worth of vertical resolution in the process. It might also be the quality of Final Cut Pro’s scaling algorithm.
The quality of image scaling/resampling can vary between different applications. You may find that downscaling your footage in After Effects or Combustion provides different results than doing so in Final Cut Pro. Experiment with test clips and see if there is any noticable difference in scaling quality between different apps.
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