Editing multicam w/ differing pixel aspect ratios
 

I have a project that is about to come in the door where I need to edit video from 3 cameras. 2 are Sony cameras running 1080i as a full 1920x1080 image with a square PAR. The other camera is a Canon that is running 1440x1080.

Will there be issues trying to edit this together or will I need to convert the Canon's video to a different format? What would a good format be? I'll likely be getting prores files for that from my client (they use final cut and will do the dump at their site)

Thanks- I'm still pretty new at the multi-cam thing.

-Ben

I cut Canon's HDV footage from an XHA1 along with 1080i footage from a Sony handycam and RED 4k footage every day with no problems. I generally pick a sequence that matches either my smallest footage (HDV from Canon) or I go with 720p if I need to do any reframing of the footage. There have never been any issues that I've seen. I guess PPro just automatically adjusts pixel aspect ratios to match whatever the sequence is.

I am working on my first Premiere project and did a multicam edit with HDV (1440x1080) and AVCCAM (1920x1080) footage with no problems.

Same here; no problem doing putting any mix of four of the following together in the same sequence to be nested into a multicam sequence for editing: Canon 30F HDV, Canon 30P AVCHD, Canon AVCHD 60i, Canon 5DmII MOV, and GoPro mp4 files (1080p30).

I don't know for sure it is the optimum way but since different presets use different editing modes, I select the preset for the most computationally demanding footage (which in most cases I guess to be AVCHD). Seems to work for me.

I've never had a "pixel matching" problem when mixing "1440" HDV footage (including from an XHA1) with "1920" AVCHD in any PPro CS5 multi-cam sequence. The mix has always been seamless for me.

For instance, I've done several with projects in the last couple of months where I had 3 AVCHD tracks and 3 HDV tracks. I put the three AVCHD and one HDV track into a sequence, synched them, nested that sequence into a multi-cam sequence and then put the other two HDV cam footage on tracks (for cut-aways) over the top of the multi-cam. Add titles and color correction filters and things can bog down a bit, but no problems with image or aspect ratios being weird.

As for sequence presets: I have an MXO2 Mini for external display so I generally use a Matrox HD 1920-1080i sequence preset. Before the new Matrox drivers came out this summer, I generally used the Adobe AVCHD preset whenever I had any AVCHD footage in the mix. If I ran a conversion to avi through Cineform NEO HD 5, I used a standard PPro "HDV 1080/30 (60i)" preset for the sequence.

A note on Cineform. Unless you tell it otherwise, I think NEO "avi" files are still 1440 for HDV and 1920 for AVCHD. I've never had any problem mixing Cineform conversions, either. I cannot comment on ProRes files since I've never had to work with them.

It seems unlikely you'll have a problem, but individual systems do sometimes have inexplicable quirks.If you did run into a problem with mixing the footage on your system, I'd suggest downloading a Cineform NeoHD trial version, running conversions and specifiying the pixel aspects you want and seeing if that fixes the problem.

You do not "need" to use Cineform with CS5, assuming you've got suitable hardware, but Cineform does provide conveniences that make it worthwhile for me. I continue to use Cineform in mutli-cam edits for three main reasons: (a) with Cineform files, I'm less likely to get odd artifacts with color matching/correction (there is something about a mixed HDV-AVCHD sequence on my system where applying a CS5 "auto color" effect to footage from some of my Sony cams will cause flickering in the correction, a artifact that does not seem to happen for me with footage from my XHA1 nor when working with Cineform files); (b) I often can get most or all of the color matching done with Cineform's First Light; since this is stored in file metadata, it does not load the computer as the PPro effects do; and (c) I can work with longer segments before reaching the threshold of "long-enough" to result in the computer bogging down.

So, to sum up, there is no problem with aspect ratios when you mix HDV and AVCHD in a PPro multi-cam sequence but there are other issues might (or might not) crop up because of the load that editing multiple native AVCHD tracks imposes on a computer.

This is all great info- thanks everybody.

I've had good luck pulling in Pro Res files. Just finishing up another project where I shot the wide shots with my NX5U and got close hand-held shots off of HMC-150 cameras that were dumped into Final Cut (hence the Pro Res files) and it has worked beautifully. No issues outside of some stupid mistakes I made putting my multicam nested footage into a sequence of the wrong resolution. Oops! (even that worked fine until I tried to do things like crop and zoom certain shots)

Also good to know about the flicker issues and such. I've seen them, but haven't worried too much about them as they don't seem to export into the final product. Perhaps I'll give Cineform a try in the near future to see how that works for me.

--Ben