Ok, I think i got it. As long as I don’t click on ‘scale’ or ‘set frame’ Premiere just automatically crops the 2K footage when it’s placed into an HD sequence (which is kind of not intuitive and strange, but…)
So you’re saying that I should start with a HD sequence and then when I drag the 2K footage in I can scale it to 1980? Do you mean to crop it because wouldn’t scaling it distort the footage?