HDV on DV timeline?
 

I just filmed a concert as a favour to a family member (aka freebie!). Being completely last minute, I just used a Z1P and a couple of cheap Sony TRV cameras, as that is all that I could throw together at the time. Trouble is, the Z1P captured in HDV, therefore 16:9, and the others all shot at 4:3. That's not too much of a problem, as the Z1P footage still looks quite good cropped.

But, as the end result is going to be SD-DVD, I was thinking...

Is it possible to bring HDV footage into a DV timeline so I can make use of the bigger resoultion from the Z1P? For example, instead of cropping the HD 16:9 footage, can I "move" so its better framed in the 4:3 project?

As the HD footage has more information than the SD footage, I'm thinking I should be able to make use of that factor, by say, panning the HD footage in the SD project. I hope I'm making sense.

Now I know you can't mix HD and SD footage in the FCP timeline. However is there any other way to pull it off? I'm thinking maybe I can make a HDV sequence and then "crop" it to SD after editing.

Just curious!

Your idea of editing the HDV footage you like, cropping/zooming it is probably the best one but the most labour intensive. A slightly quicker way would be to capture the HDV as DV (in camera downconvert), crop and zoom in realtime at DV res, knowing the resize limits (about 60% to look as sharp as native DV) and then at the end recapturing the downconverted clips as HDV. You'll need to render all the HDV but by then you'll have made all your editing decisions.

The caveat is that you'll have to check you HD footage before hand as any resizes at DV res will mask HD focusing issues, and you might find out that you include slightly out of focus shots that you didn't pick when editing the downconverted offline footage, but then you did say this was a freebie, don't break your back over it!

Another way would be to batch convert all your footage to AIC, batch upscaling the DV footage with something like MPEG streamclip or compressor, and editing everything at HD, then downscaling the final output, though I've never done this so I make no promises that it's the best quality or the most efficient route, but Streamclip could convert everything overnight and then go straight to it the next day with no codec issues.