[Gary Christensen]

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.