Need Help With Editing
 

I have a FX1 and I recently shot something using two DVX100s and my camera to get various angles...now in post I'm trying to figure out how to bring all of this video together and I need to know in Final Cut Pro how to either:

A) Crop my FX1 footage into 4:3 SD video
OR
B) Crop the DVX100 footage into 16:9 SD Video

I'd prefer to have everything in 16:9, but I have to pump out this hour long video in two weeks so I'll need to do whatever is faster. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks

Well, you can 'down-rez' from you FX1 (I think. I know you can with the Z1U) and still keep the anamorphic wide screen. There is a setting that allows you to down-convert right out of the camera and there are various options for that as well.

You would bring that into FCP along with your DVX footage and everything would be DV resolution.

That's probably the easiest way to do it.

Hope this helps,

Jim

BTW, I used to work in your area. I flew for Independence Air before I was laid off when they went under.

Getting the HD footage into standard isnt the issue...the FX1 will also downconvert out of the camera... but the DVX's dont record in 16:9 so thats where my problem arises. I need to turn the 4:3 DVX footage into 16:9 SD footage

There is always the option to stretch the 4:3 footage. But I dont reccomend it. You see, you can always downgrade footage and not lose any quality (or not oo much) But you cant do it the other way.

I suggest downconverting the FX1 footage to SD with 4:3 output to match the DVX100 footage. It would be very difficult to doing any other way and if you do, it would look terrible. Nothing in 4:3 looks nice on widescreen, with black bars, or stretching, it never looks nice IMHO.

Okay...so how do I crop my 16:9 footage in Final Cut Pro? I found a letterbox tool but no cropping tool for losing the sides off my HDV footage

If you're going to mix 16:9 HDV and 4:3 SD footage with the goal of creating a 4:3 SD deliverable, on the Final Cut Pro timeline you can resize the HDV footage using the "Aspect Ratio" and "Scale" controls under the Motion tab. For 1440 x1080 HDV footage getting resized into a 720 x 486 SD timeline, try Aspect Ratio = -50 and Scale = -68% (this is close, but not exact).

This approach gives you more flexibility than the camera downconvert option, but is not as fast. If you set the Video Processing -> Motion FIlter Quality = Best in Sequence Settings, you'll get higher quality scaling than the camera does, with the added benefit of being able to pan and scan from shot to shot if you need to. Since Final Cut Pro is totally not into mixing media formats on a single timeline, be prepared for a looooooooooong render time. Using the downconvert from the camera will be faster, allowing all the media to be in the same format, the way Final Cut Pro likes it.

You should've shot 16X9 with the DVX 100s. I know it's not "true" 16X9 because it doesn't use the top and bottom of the 4X3 CCD chips, but it doesn't record black bars. It recordes anamorphic DV that can be dropped into an anamporphic DV sequence and be displayed at 16X9 natively without black bars. Black bars are always added in by the playing device (ie. DVD player) when playing 16X9 material on a 4X3 display.

But you aren't at that step. What you have to do now is cropping or masking. Whether you go to 4X3 or 16X9 depends on your framing. Y'see if you mask the FX1 footage to be 4X3 you're going to lose stuff on the left and right of the footage. If your close-up is too close you might wind up losing someone's face. The same goes for the reverse with going to 16X9 with the DVX footage except you're losing the top and bottom of the frame.

Personally I'd do 16X9. Here's how I think you'd do it. To go to 16X9 you will create a regular 4X3 DV sequence. Then you will need to capture the FX footage with the downconversion to DV (you can capture HDV and then drag your footage into the DV sequence and have FCP do the downconvert, but it requires rendering. Technically FCP should do a better downconvert than the FX on the fly, but considering your time crunch I'd take the quicker way out and just downconvert out of the camera. The downconvert setting is in the menu and when selected the blue DV light will be lit on the Firewire port of the camera. All of this assumes you shot HD. If you shot widescreen DV with the FX then all you have to do is just capture it with an Anamorphic DV setting.) Capture the now DV footage coming from the camera with a DV ANAMORPHIC PRESET to maintain the correct 16X9 aspect ratio. When you put the clip into the 4X3 timeline it will display the full 16X9 frame with unused black above and below. Then when you put your DVX footage in the sequence create two black mattes that you can put over your footage (top and bottom) to mask the 4X3 footage making it look 16X9. Your FX footage will guide you how much you need to mask. Make it match and then presto, it'll all look 16X9. This method also gives you the flexibility to adjust your frame with the DVX footage. Let's say you have some really important thing at the top of your DVX frame. You can just adjust the frame down and get that in the 16X9 frame as long as you don't go below your black matte. One note, with this workflow you really have a 4X3 sequence that just has black bars rendered on the top and bottom so it looks correct. However, you can't compress it with a 16X9 setting or it will look stretched. You output 4X3. On a regular TV it will look just like all other 16X9 footage, but on a true 16X9 display it will not fill the screen like true 16X9 but will be cropped on the sides just like regualr 4X3 footage.

Hope that helps.

Also, it's important for everyone to know that 4X3 with black bars is not 16X9. 16X9 is a native shooting aspect ratio that when captured and edited correctly doesn't have black bars. It's exported 16X9 and then a player will add black bars when needed to mask out on a 4X3 display and when played on a 16X9 display will fill the screen. 4X3 with black bars looks like 16X9 on a 4X3 TV but will reveal it's true nature when played on a 16X9 TV