Input appreciated...
 

Bride and Groom got married in U.S (civil ceremony) for legal reasons. They are now having a ceremony here in Canada as the official "Wedding". The civil ceremony was shot in HD and there is 4 DVD's with about 1.5 hrs of footage.

The Bride's sister (my liason) wants to know if I can take the HD raw footage and incorporate it into (and fully edit it) into the footage I take. I am not filming in HD. Her exact quote: "if we gave you HD raw files of my sister's civil marriage, if you can compress it and put into a playable dvd format or if you can edit it and perhaps add it to the Toronto wedding DVD."

Questions:
1. Is this possible and/or a big hassle?
2. How time consuming

I'm using CS3 Premiere Pro if that matters.

Thanks in advance!

I use Premiere Pro 2.0, and I can currently take HD footage and import it into a SD project without any problem. You will have to scale the footage down of course and render it all. Will you be shooting in SD Widescreen, because the HD footage will be Widescreen and if you shoot 4x3 you will either have to letterbox the HD footage or have your footage be 4x3 within an 16x9 project...

Thanks for helping! Do you mind answering a few questions?? Actually a LOT of questions!! lol!

When you say "scale the footage down and render it" what does that mean? I'm new to this and the lingo still escapes me!

I usually don't shoot in widescreen but would it make more sense to so in this instance knowing that the HD footage will be widescreen?

What does "letterbox the HD footage" mean?

Sorry for so many questions!
Thanks

to "scale" footage down is to reduce the size of the video frame itself. it's like shrinking the picture to fit to what you need. HD footage is 1920 x 1080 (depending on what camera it was shot on of course) and SD footage is 720 x 480. So as you can see the HD footage is much larger than SD footage, and this can be a benifit when editing in SD and using HD footage because you can always scale footage down in size but its never good to try and scale it up. Take the HD footage and import it into your project. If premiere doesn't automatically shrink it down for you then go to the Effects control tab and in "motion" take the scale number down till it fits correctly.

If your camera can shoot widescreen and its not a letterbox'd widescreen then do so to match the aspect ratio correctly. Letterbox is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterbox (check out the link to best explain) its when black bars are inserted to keep the pictures correct aspect ratio. if you typically shot in 4x3 then you can also import the HD footage into a 4x3 proect and scale the footage down to fit. you then could pan the HD footage left or right to center it up in the frame. you have a bunch of options when using HD footage in a SD project, but messing with it is the best way to learn. So go try it and see which way you like best before you shoot the actual ceremony.

There's about 20 different ways of skinning this cat...

But whatever you do, at least film the SD with an anomorphic 16:9 ratio. If you shoot 16:9 (not the cropped version), your life will become somewhat easier.

If it's ease of use you're looking for, create a Standard Widescreen DV from the Premiere templates, and import the HD footage. Yes, you'll need to render out to DV, but at least when edit time comes along, you'll be able to incorporate the T.O. shoot with the HD stuff flawlessly.

Experiment with a small sample. HDV is Top field first, so you might have to reverse field order on output..

Thanks for the advice guys! This will save me a lot of work I suspect!

what is a T.O. shoot?

T.O. Shoot is short for "Toronto shoot"....

Kelley and I are city neighbours, and T.O. is part of our lingo...
Sorrry, i didn't realize it was a unique phrase...

ahh, no problem. Now I can fit in when I start working out of the states : )