16:9 and 4:3 footage, same time-line.
 

Hey, guys. I got a problem I knew I would eventually end up facing... I have footage that's shot by the jvc hd110. It's 720p 24p. On the other hand, I have footage that's shot by the Canon XL-1. And it's 30fps and 4:3. What's the work around for this? I'm editing in an open timeline, but how do I letter box the 4:3 footage? Basically what is the solution for this? Do I have to put the 16:9 footage in 4:3? I should've figured out how to do this a long time ago, but I've just put it off and now I finally have a project that has two different aspect ratios. Gahh. In the mean time, I'm gonna do some research on this and hopefully find a solution. I'm kind of on a time crunch, and you guys around are always very helpful and quick to respond. Thanks a lot! Take it eassssyyyy.

Pretty easy:
Make a 4x3 sequence (e.g. PAL or NTSC DV) and throw a 16x9 (e.g. HDV) into it
and it will become letterboxed (black stripes on top and bottom).

Make a 16x9 sequence (e.g. PAL DV anamorphic, XDCAM EX, etc) and throw a 4x3 clip
into it - it will get black "suspenders" on the left and the right side.

Preferrably do not mix SD and HD formats. Better: Edit HD in an HD timeline and
throw that into a SD time line as if it were a clip. Render the SD timeline. Done.

You may go the other way round, too. But will have to uprez SD material to HD, for
example with InstantHD from Magic Bullet.

I am assuming your project is 16:9. With 4:3 material you can either pillar box it (black bands each side) or scale it up and lose the top and bottom (and some resolution). Letterboxing is for 16:9 material in a 4:3 project or display. The scale control on the motion tab will allow you to scale to get rid of the black bars, along with vertical position if you want anything other than a slice across the centre of the video.

The biggest problem is if the Canon footage is 30p (not 60 fields interlaced). 30p and 24p do not mix well at all. Lots of motion inconsistencies. Is your project intended for HD 16:9 or SD 4:3? Is it for broadcast or projection in a theater?

For broadcast, if the SD footage is 30p and after importing into a 720 24p HD timeline it looks odd (it might not depending on the footage), I suggest editing in HD 60i. 24p and 30p will import decently into a 60i or 60p timeline. You might need to adjust the 3:2 pulldown on the 24p footage. Someone else will have the best way to do this.

For 24p projection, I am at a loss at what to do with 30p footage.

similar problem
 

I'm editing an EPK for a client which consists of multiple formats and aspect ratios including SD DV 4:3 footage that she shot in the recording, SD 16:9 Mpeg4 live footage ripped from a DVD and some HDV 30p 16:9 live footage that I shot for her.

She's hell bent on me using the 4:3 SD footage that she shot in the studio, but it is pretty awful (noisy, grainy, shaky and bad focus issues). The content is great, but it looks like complete crap. I guess the ramifications of that could comprise a whole thread of its own, but I really need to use what I have at hand to get this thing done.

I just need some help on the overall work flow and project setup and how to handle the different formats in the same sequence. Is is inevitable I'll have to be rendering alot??
any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'm editing in FCS2 on a MacBook Pro.

thanks,
brendan

I guess you will have to make the bad looking footage a virtue.

I had exactly the same issue earlier this year. The kicker was that the 4:3 footage was shot letterboxed! I brought it in to the timeline, zoomed way in to fill the screen, did some color correction, rendered and let it go. The client didn't care and the footage wasn't as bad as I feared. The graininess and bad video actually helped in the end, something well shot would have looked worse! I tried some filter combinations but the footage always looked weirder than if I left it alone aside from some color correction.

I just finished a project where everything was shot in HD but we had some older archival footage shot in SD. I dropped the 4:3 footage into the 16:9 timeline and then used the Aspect Ratio slider (Motion tab) to stretch the 4:3 aspect ratio to fit 16:9. In my opinion, this is no different than when people stretch a 4:3 image to 16:9 on their home flat-screen tv. The client liked it much better than with black bars on either side (pillar-boxed).

Realize though, that in our case, the video was older archival video, so the fact that it looked kind of crappy was okay.

I downloaded the demo of Red Giant InstantHD Pro, but I wasn't impressed with the results. Probably need to try it again though to be sure.

yeah, i've been messing around with stretching and color correcting the 4:3 footage to make it fill the 16:9 frame, it looks like that is what I'll have to go with, it will have to work I guess.

Another issue is that the 16:9 mpeg4 sd footage that I ripped from her dvd when dropped in the HDV timeline needs to be rendered, I can't deal with that, it plays with stutters when I have unlimited RT on and I get dropped frames error. Should I just set to sequence to match the 16:9 mpeg4 clip...will I have to render an HDV clip i drop it in the timeline? it turns out the majority of material is SD anyway, so I might as well use an SD 16:9 timeline.

I don't know, kind of got thrown to the sharks on this one, also my first project editing with FCS 2 and messing with this open timeline...and this chick (client) is a handful..talk about nashville country artist egos.

Mitch, I tried instant HD on some old GL1 footage I had and wasn't very impressed either.

thanks

Why is it a 16:9 mp4 file? Why not a regular DV file?

Did you use Handbreak? Perhaps you should rip it with MPEGStreamclip.

ok, so I went back and ripped the dvd using mac the ripper and converted with mpeg streamclip as I had done originally, and created a 16:9 dv version (I don't know why the hell I did an Mpeg4 in the first time, my head's in the clouds I tell ya..:)). everything is playing nicely in the FCP timeline now...awesome! time to chop!! I used aspect ratio controls in the motion tab to scale the 4:3 material to fill the frame, not the best, but it'll work.

wow, I feel like an idiot, but glad I got on here and consulted. It's amazing how easily obvious things are overlooked when under pressure..geez.

thanks

Glad to hear your making progress Brendan.

In the future (if possible) I would choose ProRes over DV. When we purchased our new HD camera, we also purchased an AJA Io HD and JVC Pro 24-inch monitor. So for the first time I was able to capture analog footage in a variety of different formats and compare them on a high quality monitor. I captured from our Beta SP deck in DV, ProRes, ProRes HQ and 10-bit Uncompressed. There was very little difference between the ProRes and Uncompressed codecs, but there was a HUGE difference in the DV codec. It looked terrible. This really surprised me as I had been shooting/editing in DV for the past 7 years.

The point is, now that you're editing in HD, you should use ProRes to capture SD footage so it will hold up better when you scale it up to HD.

I did some more testing yesterday with Instant HD and Instant HD Pro. I did see where Instant HD Pro made my SD footage look better than if I did the upscaling using FCP tools, but in my opinion, it's still not good enough to warrant the purchase price. Other's may be more critical and want the best possible quality at any cost.

follow up
 

Ok so my deadline for this "epk" was today and I got it done, had to throw some of it together kind of quickly, but here is the finished product:

Angela Peterson EPK on Vimeo

I say "epk" in quotations because I'm used to an EPK containing some sort of interview footage. She actually requested that I not use any of the interview footage that she had, just the live footage, studio footage, press photos and 5 recorded music tracks, so this is more of a highlight video of her recently recorded tracks.

the 16:9 and 4:3 distorted footage played fairly nice together on the HD timeline, although I think cutting between the two proves to be jarring at times. Any thoughts or criticism are welcome.

Thanks for the suggestions too,
brendan

I think it came out pretty good! (that must have been a lot of work)

The only thing that's "jarring" to me (the SD footage intercut fine in my opinion) was that for the first 1/2 of the video, she wasn't lip synced to the music. I'm guessing there's not much you can do about that though.

thanks mitchell,

Yeah, there wasn't much i could do about that, most of the footage wasn't meant to be synced, the live footage wasn't even of the songs she recorded, with the exception of a couple clips, it was all I had to work with though. more of a montage. It would've been great to have live shots of those songs that I could have synced to the actual tracks. I agree that it can be kind of awkward watching performance footage that isn't synced to the music bed, it's just in how you view it I guess.

She seemed to really love it, so I guess that's the most important thing. If I had my way I would have liked to have shot more of the footage myself and get some new interview footage as well, so it would flow better, I guess that all comes in time with bigger budgets as well!