Mixing 1080i & 720p footage
 

Forgive my ignorance here, and I should try before posting, but I don't have the 1080 footage captured yet.

I told my 2nd cameraman to shoot in HD on his Canon A1, while I shot with my Panny 150. I had no clue his camera would ONLY do 1080. I shot all my footage in 720/60p, and his was all 1080/60i. Will that create a big problem in editing, mixing this footage? Is there anything I can do ahead of time to help mix the two resolutions and frame rates?

I imagine I need to downrez his footage to 720, but how should I deal with his interlaced footage compared to my progressive footage?

Again, please excuse my ignorance. I have never edited an HD wedding before. And I don't have his footage yet because I need to borrow his camera to capture it. I imagine I can't capture HDV footage from a non-HDV camera.

Thanks!
Dan

Interlaced and progressive footage don't mix well together, they have completely different looks and often slightly different color spaces.

The easiest thing to do would be to convert your 1080i footage into 720p (de-interlacing during ingest) to make the footage match up in the timeline nicely.

It's always easier - and far better looking - to de-interlace "i" footage rather than force progressive into an interlaced format, which never looks good.

Edit in a 720P ProRes timeline. The 1080i footage should down-convert fine. You might need to apply a de-interlace filter on the 1080i footage. I mixed 720p30 and 1080i60 once for some extras on a DVD but the 1080 footage was shot in 30p so there was less to get messed up. Of course the end product was SD so any problems that might have occurred were smudged out by the drop in resolution.

Thanks for the replies! It seems simple enough then. If I just drop 1080i footage into my 720/60p timeline, will it convert to 720 automatically?

You know, I said I could test this because I didn't have his tapes with the 1080i footage. But, I can just shoot some 1080i clips with my 150 and drop it in fcp with some 720p clips and see what I can do.

Thanks for the tips!

I'm editing a time line with an EX1@ 1080i and p, EX1@ 720/50p and a Z1 @1080/50i
I have a Final cut Seq setup for 720/50p and at all seems to work.

Is you final output going to be progressive or interlaced? If it's interlaced I'd do everything in 1080i60. If it's progressive I'd do everything in 720p60. I mix 'i' and 'p' all the time on a show I work on ('bout 50/50) and I use an 'i' timeline mainly because the show delivers 'i'.


-Andrew

Final output will be progressive, so I'll work in 720p. I experimented with downrezing some 150 1080i footage and it worked out fine... especially when the final product will be SD.

One nice part w/ FCP is that it is built to handle all these fun formats we have to deal with.

I second the thought that stay with whatever format you'll export to.

If you shot 24p or 30p I would suggest 1080p24 or 1080p30, but since you have 60p, then 720p footage will be your best bet. It won;t be perfect, but FCP should handle most of the messy background stuff.