[James Ault]

Sorry not to respond sooner, Shane. Was on a shoot in Philadelphia. Thanks so, so much for your help comprehending all this. I will certainly need to hire an skilled editor to handle this, and will be sharing your posts with him/her. Meanwhile, I will share your good counsel with them, and, meanwhile, will create a unified roughcut to view as you suggest. Hope the 25fps won’t stutter too much. Finally, one of my weaknesses is not knowing how to fix size or scaling issues. Need to know how best to do that. Thanks again!

[James Ault]

Thanks so much, Shane. On a shoot right now and will respond more fully later.

[James Ault]

Thanks so much for your thoughts and suggestions, Shane. As confessed, I’m a technical klutz, a student of culture and history who got into documentary filmmaking in the cinéma vérité genre by working with some of its pioneers in this country back in the 16mm 1980s. Initially learned to shoot and get good sound myself in the field and only much, much later, to do rough editing in FCP7. I turn to young editors I’ve worked with for coaching. In this case, I need a lot! And they didn’t know how to handle this problem. Often turn to Creative Cow and other online resources to problem-solve.

In response to your comments, I guess I let the sequences reside in 720 because I’m using some old SD footage in 4:3 I shot a while back with my DVCAM camera (didn’t know how best to handle it in 1080). But most of the footage has been shot with my SONY PMW 200 in 1920×1080 XDCAM HD422 1080p30 (50mbs). Your response suggests 720 doesn’t make sense here. If so, don’t know how best to convert the existing two sequences into 1080.)

The film I’m working on is a labor of love done in my semi-retirement years with a tiny budget raised via Kickstarter. It’s on the life a great musician in Zimbabwe, Machanic Manyeruke, known as the father of gospel music there. It may get some play on cable television, even public broadcasting, somewhere around the world, because of the profound cross-cultural lessons his life-story holds (including that of his son, now a dance hall star in Zimbabwe) but it will mostly be used, I imagine, by educators around the world, accessed as digital downloads and projected to classes from computers.

I want to combine these two sequences and post the full roughcut online to get feedback from viewers, before making changes and moving forward to do completion work on the film. Extensive subtitling is done but even a rough sound mix remains. In response to your suggestions, I must confess I don’t know the in’s and out’s of interlacing versus progressive video, and don’t understand why you suggest cutting it in a Pal DV timeline (all the footage is in NTSC of course). Wondering whether I should convert both sequences to 1280 (or 1920?)x1080 (and how best to do that), and then spend several days just rebuilding the 35-minute sequence, clip by clip, at 29.97 fps? Maybe chatting by phone sometime would help, if you’d be open for that. Would appreciate any further clarifications or suggestions you (or others) would make. (My email: contact@jamesault.com) Sorry for the mess and my ignorance and thanks for your help!