Mixing HD and SD footage in Movie Studio Platinum
 

Hi all - advice please!

Just decided to take the plunge into HD and bought an FX1e ... keeping my good old VX2000 as backing up and secondary camera, and selling my XM2 (GL2).

I am working on a series of shorts for publication on the web as .wmv or FLASH ... and plan to shoot mainly with the FX1e but intercut it with SD footage from the VX2000 and other single CD Sony cameras in nightshot mode.

My question ... from what read it's best to edit the HD footage direct in Movie Studio / Vegas. If so, what settings do I need to set the project in? As the HD pixel size is 1.33, will this have an effect on the SD footage?

Help appreciated.

Paul.

Better to advise us what version of Platinum you are running. That could make a difference.

I have not used Platinum for a couple of years, but it seems to me Platinum has been shadowing the full Vegas version pretty much. I can tell you that in Vegas 8, dropping an HDV 16:9 file on 4:3 SD timeline results in Vegas automatically letterboxing the 16:9 HDV footage. Similarly, if you are working with a time line set up with properties for a 16:9 HDV file, the SD footage would have pillars on each side. I have shot my VX2000 with a Century wide adapter, and you can change the properties of the footage in the project bin to reflect 1.212 aspect ratio.

Hi Chris - I'm using Movie Studio Platinum 8.

So ... following your answer ... would it be best to work in an HD project, drop in the SD footage from the VX2000 (I don't have the adapter), and crop the SD image to 16:9?

Hi Paul:

I assume eventual final format is SD, and that you want to go all 16:9

So first of all, I edit and render in the Cineform intermediate file that comes with my NeoHDV, which is something I don't think you have available. So what I will do is mix my footage on the 16:9 HDV timeline. I will frame, zoom and pan any footage as desired. I your case that would mean "zooming" the SD footage to make eliminate the side pillars.

Then I render the entire project to an SD DV 16:9 avi file.

Note: In the past I have noted that rendering hdv (.m2t) files directly to mpeg for DVD has not given the best results. It seems that going through the intermediate process of rendering to an SD DV .avi file and then rendering to DVD mpg works better. Don't ask me why.

Paul.
Set your project settings the same as the clips with the highets resolution, ie the FX1.
To do this, select a clip on the timeline, right click>properties, a widow will pop up giving you the resolution of that clip, set the project preferences to this.

For the SD footage, if you want it to be 16:9 select the "pan and crop" tool on the 4:3 clip, when the pan and crop window pops up, you should have a drop down list available with some preset crops, one of these should be 16:9, so select that one, you can also adjust it slightly if your headroom isn't correct following the crop.
(Headroom>space above the subjects head, you don't want a head shot with 2 foot of space above the head, better to pull the cropped window down a bit to show a head and shoulders shot)

Render as mpeg-2.

Paul.

Again, test my way too. My experience that something goes on rendering from hdv's mpeg, to SD .mpeg causing issues with the quality, but that issue may have been resolved after I started using Cineform exclusively. I definitely would not render to SD .mpeg, if further editing or color work is to be done, as the DV .avi file structure is more amenable to editing cleanly.

So when I render the .wmv, do I set the pixal aspect ratio as 1.33 or 1.212?

Thanks for the help so far.