Clean down-convert from HDV to 4:3
 

I shoot with a Canon XHA1 and edit in Premiere Pro CS3. A very good combination, to be sure.
But now I have shot a medical program that I produce, in HDV and need to broadcast in SD in a 4:3 format. So far I have not found a way to down convert from HDV 16:9 to SD 4:3, either in-cam or in Premiere.
It's in Farsi and the final product is for broadcast to Afghanistan.

I also have another issue that is driving me crazy on a similar project. This one is meant to stay in the 16:9 format, and is in English.
I shoot a doctor in her home office, and she has several degrees on the wall behind her. We shot our last show in HD, 16:9 format. Looks good, very sharp, except that there are several reflections in the glass of the degree frames that are very annoying.
Is there a way to eliminate or reduce this glare in Premiere, or can the offending clips be uploaded to Photoshop and fixed there? I have been researching this topic a lot but have come up basically empty-handed.

Would it be possible to use Tiffen's new filtering program--either in Premiere or Photoshop and apply a polarizer effect to it? Does anyone have any experience with this program, and is it useable with Premiere?

Any help on tese issues would certainly be appreciated
Thanks in advance!
SW

My suggestion is to edit in the native 16x9 HDV and then when you finish just export to what ever format you want and choose 4x3 and then in the input tab select crop 4x3.

Steve... you can downconvert to 16:9 SD in the A1 and load it into a 4:3 PP SD project. Since the project will be delivered SD it will be easier and quicker to edit with SD footage.

Can't talk to the Tiffen product but might be able to fix it with a simple matte in PP or if the camera moves at all, you might want to drag it into AE and apply the matte there using whatever they call that motion tracking tool. (Can't remember the proper name for it.)

The best results for downconvertion is to renders to hdv (or whatever format you're editing in) in PPro CS3 and then do the downconvertion with Virtualdub using the resize filter (try the different filter modes like Precise Bicubic, etc). You'll get a far better downconvertion this way.

Daniel
"The Appearance of a Man"
Trailer: YouTube - The Appearance of a Man - Film Trailer

I've been very happy with the latest version of TMPEG Xpress 4.5 for downconverting my finished HDV (Cineform files) to Widescreen SD. I've read that it had problems in the past but the current version uses Lanczos-3 (by default) for resizing and the finished quality is really clean. It's also fairly fast when using a current computer.

Regards, Marc

One more option...

Downscaling HD footage using Avisynth | Fohdeesha Media