[Sam Morrill]

Hey Steve, unfortunately, no one was able to answer this question for me. Fortunately, I didn’t have to use SmoothCam on my project after all. I’d be curious to know what the answer is anyway. Theoretically, I’d imagine that down-res’ing a lightly scaled 1080p clip to 720p would be higher quality than a native/unsclaed 720p clip, but I’m still not sure.

[Sam Morrill]

Hi Andy,

Thanks again for the response. I’d actually rather not have to pan and scan the 16:9 footage.

I’m admittedly not putting a lot of effort into this video, so I don’t mind the letterboxing. Additionally, I found that when I brought the 720p footage into a 640 x 480 NTSC sequence, I had to do a substantial amount of rendering and I’d really like to get this done as quickly as possible.

Basically, I just want to convert all of my footage to plain old 640 x 480 NTSC by letterboxing the 16:9 footage and up-resing the 370 x 240 footage. What do you think would be the best method to do this?

I understand that if the quality of the video were my priority, your method would be best, but I’m really just going for convenience here.

Thanks again,
Sam

[Sam Morrill]

Hey guys,

Thanks to all for answering my question.

Basically, to make a long story short, I’m going to be editing this 720p footage with some 370 x 240 footage (gross right?) Rather than edit everything in a 720p sequence and have to render all of the SD footage or vice versa, I thought it’d make sense to compress everything to something in between. 640 x 480 seemed to be the right choice since it’s a pretty long video and I’m going to be uploading it to Vimeo and burning it DVD anyway. In other words, HD isn’t really important.

Also, I don’t mind that the compressed HD footage will be letterboxed while the up-res’d SD footage will be true 4:3.

All this said, should I follow Andy’s lead for compressing the HD footage?

Thanks again guys,
Sam

[Sam Morrill]

Thanks for the info, guys. If anyone else has any wisdom on the matter, it’d be great to learn more.

[Sam Morrill]

Thanks for all the help, guys.

[Sam Morrill]

Hey John, thanks for the reply. This seems like it should work, but do you or anyone else know of a way to simply disassociate the clip in the timeline with the original clip in the browser while preserving the edited clip’s in and out points?

[Sam Morrill]

Hey Jerry,

Thanks for responding.

Interestingly, I am using FCP7. When I open a clip from the sequence in the viewer, the motion tab doesn’t allow me to adjust the speed.

The only way I seem to be able to adjust the speed is by opening it from the browser into the viewer, adjusting the speed and then dragging it into the sequence. This is kind of cumbersome as I’m trying to make adjustments on the fly and don’t want to have to go through all of those steps every time I change the clip speed.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks for the help,
Sam