HDV Widescreen to SD 4:3 Help Needed
 

I recently moved to HDV and am using the Cineform Aspect HD intermediate codec with Premier Pro 2.0 and Adobe AE 7.0. I shoot local commercials and political spots.

I need help with the best method to take my HDV (widescreen by its very nature) down to a SD 720x480 4:3 file to go out to cable and broadcast stations. What is the best way to get the big 1440x1080 file down to SD 4:3 and keep the proper aspect ratio (with the black bars top and bottom on the 4:3)? I even tried just opening a 4:3 file, importing the HDV footage and just scaling it down. Now, the image fit the 4:3 just fine, but the quality when simply scaling down was beyond crap.

Any advice would be much appreicated.

If I shoot something in HDV, but intend to have a finished product in SD, I would actually consider a downconvert from my FX1 during capture.

Second choice is to do the whole edit in HDV, then convert render the project to a DV Widescreen file. I am using Premiere Pro 2.0, or Vegas. Now that should play fine on most TVs these days, as they can actually detect the NTSC widescreen broadcast and will letter box it.

Thought I haven't done this one, another alternative after render is to the 16:9 wide DV is done, is to drag that to a Regular 4:3 project, and resize the footage to fit the screen properly, if the editor doesn't actually do it.

Chris, thanks for the feedback.

The reason I am so concerned with the 4:3 format is these particular projects will go to Beta SP for local cable and broadcast. As far as HDV to SD for DVD widescreen, that I have down perfectly and it looks great...it is just the darn 4:3 for TV submission.

Hi dev

what's your system or method for downconverting to sd dvd?

Brian:

I export a full 1440x1080 finished project via the PPro 2.0 < Export <Movie<Cineform HD Codec.

I then open up the full 1440 x1080 file in TMPEGEnc and export as a DVD MPEG2 project widescreen at 720x480. I just let TMPEGEnc do the scale down to SD. I used to use Virtual Dub to convert to SD and then take it into TMPEGEnc for the MPEG2 converesion, but as far as my various tests have shown, TMPEGEnc is able to do a great job (much better than Adobe media encoder) at both the scale down and the MPEG2 export.

I imagine it works fine because I am staying in widescreen format.