[Joey Burnham]

It’s surprising that they would ask for an Mpeg 2 and not give you any other specs besides that.
Anyways, just bring your file into compressor. There is an Mpeg 2 program stream preset which would probably work.
Joey

[Joey Burnham]

[Chris Weston] “Could you, in theory, throw a blank digibeta into your analog camera and go shooting?”

no

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam

[Joey Burnham]

https://www.snellwilcox.com/products/featured/quasarphc/

[Joey Burnham]

I’m back.
Just curious, was your conversion to 1080i completely jitter free?
Joey

[Joey Burnham]

I’m not an expert on this as I usually do this through other sources, but NTSC is lower field first. Cadence should be fine.

[Joey Burnham]

Specific reason = AE is not a video converter.

Can it do this for you, yes, but it won’t be as clean as the other route.
You can nest your 1080i 29.97 (59.94) comp into an NTSC D1 comp and scale your footage to fit, but it won’t look as nice than if you use the proper tools to do this. I will get jumped on by others for saying so but I’m sticking with it.

And going from 720 to 1080 doesn’t help either. You are blowing up your picture quite a bit during that process.

Best,
Joey

oh, you should be able to do this in your NLE as well if you want to try. the percentage to scale from 16×9 to letterbox is 33% on the y-axis.

[Joey Burnham]

How long is your footage.
Here’s what I would do.

Downconvert your footage. (No AJA Card?, you have an HDSR deck that can do the downconversion for you, with letterboxing. It will be a much cleaner conversion that AE will do.)
This is assuming you have an SD deck to dub to.

Then recapture.

[Joey Burnham]

do a search on this forum for downconverting HD footage to SD and you should find your answer pretty quickly
Joey

[Joey Burnham]

It could be so many different things! You say an NTSC monitor… You are working in hd not NTSC. Have u not been working with an external monitor? Does your timeline playback jitter as well? Could be rt settings in your nle or maybe a reference issue…

[Joey Burnham]

As far as I know (and I could be wrong, but don’t think so) is that the only difference between these two formats is size. There are many flavors of both 720 and 1080 regarding frame rates, but when push comes to shove it’s only that one is bigger than the other.

the only reason I can think of someone saying that 720 is better for chroma keying is that there less to key. 🙂

you can put 720 in a 1080 timeline but you will need to scale up the footage, thus losing resolution.

Joey