[John Huff]

David and Andrew, Thank you very much for your comments. They are sincerely appreciated.

I experimented exporting the HDV sequence in animation using every possible combination of HD, SD, 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, and letterbox, crop, and sometimes another option “fit to frame if necessary” came up as well and none of them centerpunched or “cropped” off the sides of the 16:9 HDV, leaving 4:3. Every single time, unless I was exporting pure widescreen with no attempt to change to 4:3 (and 4:3 is what I want) the video got horizontally scrunched together (i.e. like changing a landscape-style rectangle to more like a square.)

So I guess the only way, unless I made a mistake or unless anybody out there knows a better way, appears to be like you said David, drop the HD sequence into an SD (and I’ll try DVCpro50) sequence, select the SD timeline and right-click it to select “open in viewer,” then scale it up in the viewer (67% seems to work pretty good) so it fills the 4:3 frame in the canvas. Then export in animation.

Is this what you meant?

Along this line I have one more question for you, if I may. If I took the SD sequence above (using DV-NTSC or DVCpro50) and instead of exporting as animation, I exported to Compressor to create an MPEG-2 file; could I submit that file burned on a DVD to a TV station for cable-TV broadcast? Assuming broadcast quality, my question concerns whether I have taken into account the pixel differences (square, 1.33 etc.) between HDV (shot & edited), SD (exported), and NTSC TV (final goal). Is there an adjustment I would need to make in the workflow to get the pixel size to come out right, similar to the way graphics have to be adjusted for NTSC television?

Again Thank you and Happy Holidays!
Best Regards,
John

[John Huff]

David,
Thank you very much, I’ll go to work on that. Do you suggest just using DV-NTSC for my new SD sequence that I’ll be dropping my HD sequence into, or is there something better? The end result will be sent for flash encoding by someone else for website streaming.

Thanks,
John