I have recently upgraded all my cameras to the Sony line of Professional AVCHD cameras. I have 2 NX5u's and one AX2000. I am primarily a Wedding Videographer, and suspect that I will be asked to deliver SD for at least a couple of more years. Here are my questions....

1. When setting up the editing project in FCP, what should the settings be, assuming I shot all the footage in 1080p/60i ? (I know that I have to transcode to Prores 422 on the Log an Transfer

2. Once the editing is done, how to I get the finest quality out to an SD format in 16:9 ratio.

3. Would there be any real advantage in shooting in 24p?

Thanks for any help or links to reference material.

Chris Sigmon
LifeSong Video Productions, LLC
LifeSong Media Productions (http://www.lifesongvideoproductions.com)

Your sequence settings should be Prores 422. (you can go to sequence>settings to change it at anytime).

To encode a DVD, I would export a quicktime (not "conversion") and make a self contained pro res or "current settings" video to bring into compressor and encode for a DVD.

The only snag is that IF your HD material is interlaced (upper) it will have to be re-interlaced (lower) with less lines to SD DVD. I would suggest simply going into your sequence settings in Final Cut and changing the interlace from "upper" to "none". This should be visually apparent in the canvas, and will throw out half of the fields cutting down the resolution and effectively de-interlacing the image. You will still have plenty of resolution to down convert into an SD DVD, and you can always go back and choose "upper" if you change your mind.

As far as I know you can't make a 24p DVD since it has to be interlaced, so there's no advantage to that.

These are just my opinions, and you probably knew a lot of this already.