[David Jahns]

an alternate way to go would be to downconvert your HD footage to 16:9 DV @ 30fps.

This would allow to drop both types of footage into the same timeline without rendering, which would be fine for an offline edit, but you are going to face a challenge when you want to conform your “online” edit – 30i and 24p are going to look quite different. If you need these to match, you’re going to want to give the 30i footage a film look, and probably even rebuild your entire timeline in a 24 frame environment.

But for offline, you should be able to use compressor to convert your HD footage to SD-DV – of course, that’s going to take a long time, depending on how much footage you have. Your 24 frame HD footage will have a repeated frame every 4 frames, but that’s fine for offline editing.

I don’t think you’re going to find a cheap and fast way to mix both formats in the same timeline without rendering – it’s either going to take either time or money. And then the online version will also take time or money.

[David Jahns]

Wow – sad to report that the KONA 3 SD Anamorphic to SD Letterbox conversion also looks pretty poor.

first time I’ve been disappointed in the KONA 3/LH cards. On the plus side, if I was doing a center cut version, that would have looked great, but the vertical squeezing adds lots of artifacting, especially on text.

So far, the best results have come from pasting the video and text clips into a 4:3 timeline, repositioning the titles, graphics, and re-rendering.

No short cuts, just reconforming for both aspect ratios.

[David Jahns]

the footage was shot DV and DVCPRO-HD, but I did the subtitling & color correction in 8 bit Uncompressed.

I will try the copy/paste method – but as most of the films are combinations of HD/SD & 865 x 486 animations, I imagine there will be a lot of title repositioning and Distort/Aspect Ratio adjustments to make.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll post again tomorrow to let you know how it works.

dave

[David Jahns]

Sweet! That sounds perfect!

I’m always hesitant to upgrade mid-project, but I will try that out. Hope it works with the KONA LHe.

[David Jahns]

I believe that is correct. Compressor will keep the current frame rate as your source file. You could also just bring your 25fps HD quicktime file directly into DVD-Sp and let it do the encoding. Just make sure your video track is set to 16:9.

Another issue with converting to 25fps:

Normally, if you export a 25fps quicktime from a 24 fps source, it will duplicate a frame, and you’ll have some stuttering issues. Another way way would be to take your 24fps HD quicktime into Cinema Tools at “conform” it to 25fps. This will cause it to play slightly faster, but smoother.

The audio will be sped up as well, so you might want to take the AIFF into Soundtrack Pro and pitch shift it down 4%. Then just drop those files in your track in DVD-SP and let it do the encode. You might get slightly better results going through compressor and spent some time tweaking the settings, but for a rough cut/screening copy the DVD-SP will look just fine.

[David Jahns]

Is your footage 1080i29.97? 720p60, 720p24?

I have done a few NTSC-DV to DVD-PAL projects, and I’ve found a few things that work better than others.

1st – don’t try to do both the MPEG-2 conversion and the PAL conversion in the same pass. Bad things will likely happen.

I would suggest: From your FCP, export a quicktime at DVCPRO-HD resolution 1080 or 720 at PAL frame rates, then take THAT file into Compressor and make the MPEG-2 file.

Then import that M2V & AC3 files into Studio Pro – and make sure you choose the PAL Video Standard in DVD-SP, obviously…