I want to combine HDV footage (shot on an H1) with SD footage (shot on an XL1 in 4:3) for delivery on a SD DVD.

-should I downconvert the HDV material in the H1 during the capture process or in FCP/Compressor?

-will I be better off with an end product (DVD) that uses a 16:9 or a 4:3 format (or doesn't in make any difference)?

-can anyone suggest an article, tutorial, or book that gives a concise description of this process?

Hi Dick,

Your Brownbag footage of wildlife is terrific, and as you know I am using some of it in a Guatemala project. I have been capturing it as SD, and resizing it on FCP5, using the crop tool. Seems to work ok.

Jack

Jack:

Thanks for the response (and the review)! So, do you output in 16:9 or 3:4?

Is there a quality hit cropping 16:9 to 3:4?

Dick

If you have lots of nice 16:9 footage you might as well make the DVD 16:9, so on a 16:9 TV it will play 16:9 and on a 4:3 TV it will be letterboxed. DVD players take care of that on 16:9 disks. They did some things right with the DVD standard.

I've had good luck doing this with FCP ==> Compressor ==> DVS Studio Pro.

OK . . . so I have some downconverted H1 clips (16:9) and import these into a FCP 5 project along with some other SD 4:3 clips. What's the best way to resize the 4:3 material in the timeline so that during the editing process everthing shows as 16:9 on my viewer and monitor.

The project's "Easy Setup" is DV-NTSC FireWire Basic. Can I alter setup or sequence parameters so that all the 4:3 clips are re-scaled to 16:9 in the time line? Or does this process have to happen in export?

Thanks Again!

Okay - so maybe I need to rephrase the question.

How do I reformat 4:3 SD clips to 16:9 SD format (for use with downconverted HDV clips)?

Thanks!

hi Dick

How do I reformat 4:3 SD clips to 16:9 SD format (for use with downconverted HDV clips)?

answer is you don't. that is not the correct workflow.
your correct sequence setting should be DV-NTSC Anamorphic.

simply add the 4:3 clips directly in the 16:9 (anamorphic) timeline and FCP will place them in the canvas with black bars at left and right (pillarboxed).

scale them to 133% so that they fit the width. obviously in doing so you will lose some of the image at top and/or bottom but that is par for the course.
reposition the image vertically to best reframe given the canvas dimensions

hope it helps
Andy

Andy . . . thanks for the quick and useful response

Dick,

Sorry for the slow response. Been under the weather. Andy's got it. Thanks. It's anamorphic from now on.

JH