Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

Hi all,

I have to try and make a half decent job of rendering out a blu-ray 1920*1080 project which will have both 1920*1080 and 1440*1080 (HDV) clips in the mix. The obvious difference in pixel aspect ratio is my main concern and I don't like the stretched or letterboxed effects one gets when rendering in these situations. All footage is 50i.

A search on this wasn't much help so some hints or tips as to how others have dealt with this would be nice.

Cheers

Russ

Re: Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

What's important is the display aspect ratio - both HD 1920x1080 and HDV are the same.

Basically, an HD 1920x1080 has no pixel aspect ratio - it's all square pixels. In HDV you have a a pixel aspect ratio which, when applied, achieves the same width and height aspect as 1920x1080. *Meaning*, when you view HDV, it is presented as 1920x1080.

There's really no issue using both HD 1920 and HDV in the same timeline, they'll both display identically with no black bars.

Re: Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

By definition a pixel must have an aspect ratio since it has two dimensions, width and height. With square pixels such as these, the aspect ratio is 1:1.

With 1440 HDV, the pixel aspect ratio is 1.333 to 1.

Re: Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

I've done this a lot and the best results I've gotten is to use Cineform to convert all footage to intermediate AVI's. For the HDV footage use HDLink to scale the footage to 1920x1080. That seems to yield very good results.

Then just render a BR compliant (which will be 16:9) file of your edit.

-Garrett

Re: Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

Arrg! You got me there! An aspect of 1:1 it is indeed.

Re: Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

Russel,

I do this all the time. Just set your Vegas project to 1920x1080i HD and Vegas will differentiate between your HDV footage and HD footage will set each clips aspect ratio automatically.

For very important projects I prefer to upsample my HDV footage to 1920x1080i using Cineform.

Marc

Re: Best way to include 1920 HD and 1440 HDV clips in a project
 

I have no problems at all with dropping HDV clips from an FX1E and AVCHD clips from a NX5E on the same timeline. The rendered output is whatever the project timeline properties are set to, i.e. 1920x1080 in my case. I've even mixed Canon 550D 1080p 25 .mov with HDV clips and it will convert everything to the output format, (either 25p or 50i as set in project properties).

Steve