Using hd footage in a 720/480 timeline

I am working on a project where I need to eventually export to 320x240. Most of my material is mini dv, however one piece is HD. I am having trouble exporting with the hd on the timeline so that the finished product is 4:3 and properly fills the screen. Right now there are black margins on both sides no matter what I do.
thanks

Here's one way to do this:
In FCP, drop you HD footage into a separate HD timeline. You said, :03, this should encode very fast. Is your HD footage shot at 24p as well? If so the downconversion will be easy. If not it can be tricky. Mixed frame rates still give me headaches too. Take your HD timeline and export using Compressor. Once Compressor launches and your sequence is in there, select it and go to Target Menu, New Target with Setting under the Settings Tab: Apple/Other Workflows/Advanced Format Conversions/Standard Definition/DV NTSC. Then go to the Inspector and click on the Encoder Tab. Click settings under Video and this is where you set your frame rate. If your HD footage was 24p, select 24 under Motion: Frame Rate. If your footage was another frame rate, this is where you can get into trouble. Choose wisely.
Next under the Geometry Tab. Under Source Inset (Cropping) and the Crop To drop down menu, select 4x3. This crops the left and right sides of your video by 120 pixels so that your output is full frame, full screen 4x3. Then hit submit. Import your new footage into your FCP DV timeline and your good to go.
As for your final output for 320x240, there are many codecs and settings to use, but a good place to start is the Apple iPod setting. This will give you a good quality .m4v file at 320x240. Just snoop around in Compressor and you'll see many others as well as being able to modify your own.

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Using letterboxed footage in my 16:9 timeline (sorry I have searched!)

Hi there,
I am working in an HD project (AJA KONA LH - 1080i 25 DVCPro HD) and I have mini DV footage that I need to include in my cut. These miniDV tapes are copies of HDCAM masters so I'm just using them now in the offline and for viewing purposes, then we'll go back to the HDCAM material for the online. The downside is that they are SD, so I'll have to render anytime I do anything to them, AND unfortunately they are Letterboxed. Will it be quicker for me to pop them through Compressor AND is there anyway to minimize quality loss when I zoom in to force them 16:9 in my timeline?
I have searched the forum, but would appreciate anyone's workflow for a situation like this...
Thanks,
Susan.

Hi Bogiesan
The workaround I'm doing right now is to use the 4x3 footage and do an HDCAM xfer once the rough cut is finalized. I have blown it up - which looks pretty nasty - but I guess it's the only way to get around doing the rough cut and wading through the material (about 10% of the program).
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What timeline format shall i use for footage in AVCHD format?

I am shooting with the Sony HXR NX5, and i would like to ask what timeline format shall i use for footage in AVCHD format? I do not see any format in the Final Cut Pro and in Motion that matches my camera format.
Thank you very much for your assistance.
Best regards,
Richard

IF you are working with FCP 7.0.3 (the last version) then you use Log and Transfer to ingest your footage from that camera, and Log and Transfer will convert the AVCHD camera files to ProRes.
Once the camera files are ingested, make a new (empty) timeline, and either drag a source clip or edit it to that timeline and you will be prompted to match the sequence settings to the source clip. Say yes and you should be good to go.
AVCHD, H.264,etc. files are not directly usable in FCP without conversion.
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Can I use 4k footage in a 1080p sequence, then export 4k without resolution loss?

Hi,
I cut a 1080p sequence using 4k footage that I scaled down in the Effect Controls window. If I export that sequence as a 4k file, will Premiere compress that original 4k footage to 1080p, then expand it back to 4k in the exported file (please say no)? Or is Premiere intelligent enough to interpret the export scaling using the size of original footage, rather than the sequence size? (Hope that makes sense)
Of course it's wise to create a sequence based on your delivery requirements, but sometimes clients change their mind and I don't feel like rescaling every damn clip. But thanks for the advice
Thanks!
David

Premiere will export to the settings of the timeline / sequence you've created. It doesn't matter what formats you've used withing that timeline. So if you use 4k in a 2k sequence, Premiere sees it as a 2k sequence and, without user intervention, will export at that format.
Obviously you can up-scale during export but i) why would you want to do that when you've previously down-scaled and ii) anything above 100% magnification will begin to pixelate.

I am using 4K Footages for editing in Premiere pro CC 2014, but its getting crash in between at every 15 to 20 mins. Kindly suggest how can it be solved, does any plugins or settings needed to edit 4K footages? Also would like to mention that footages fra

I am using 4K Footages for editing in Premiere pro CC 2014, but its getting crash in between at every 15 to 20 mins. Kindly suggest how can it be solved, does any plugins or settings needed to edit 4K footages? Also would like to mention that footages frame rates are 29.97 and i have set timeline to 25 FPS is requirement by client. kindly revert. Thanks

Thanks Richarad ..It has solved the problem but still crashes some times .As the programme has the break (bumper)after every five minutes ,i hope it will not compress bumper time too after export.

1080p footage looks horrible in 720p timeline

Hello! I have 1080p footage that i want to bring into a 720p timeline. When i bring it in, scale it to 75% and render, the result is horrible! What is a recommended workflow to use 1080p footage in a 720p timeline?
Thanks!
Kyle

"Horrible" is relative, a bit meaningless.
Since we don't know how much you understand about what you're doing, or what you expect as far as quality, or where you are viewing your results, try not to take this personally.
You are throwing away a full 35% of your pixels so, yes, it's going to look a bit soft. Additionally, you are squooshing all of those lost pixels into new mooshy pixels.
The only way to maintain a pixel-to-pixel relationship is not to scale you footage but to crop it. Anything else compromises the image quality because of the processing. You must be viewing your rendered output on a full resolution monitor suitable to the task before deciding your scaling or processing operations are really "horrible" or they just appear that way as an artifact of the presentation.
bogiesan

Quicktime Encoding for 720*480

Hi,
I have a 3 minute movie that I want to deliver under 10mb at 720*480.
I tried matching the settings that were used for the Final Cut demos on the Apple site (h264/90kbps) - but every thing comes out horribly pixelated.
Does anyone have some good standard settings for Quicktime exports? I seem to be making it up as I go along here...
Much thanks in advance...

MPEG-2 is for DVD only I beleive. But don't quote me...compression is FAR from my forté. The only thing I can suggest is testing out various codecs and see what they look like. Encode only a 15 second section so that you aren't wasting a whole lot of valuable time.
Yes, there are updates for your setup available online. They will go only to a certain point, however. When they hit the wall for the PAID updates.
Shane

I can't use the cut tool above the primary timeline...

I can't use the cut tool above the primary timeline...
it only works on the primary timeline. why and what can I do?
thanks

Are you talking about the blade tool? You can use that on any clip, regardless of where it is. If you talking about using the keyboard shortcut, then the connected clip has to be selected. It doesn't have to be a storyline.

Workaround? - Using Interpret Footage AME renders active content only for original movie length

I submitted a bug on this behavior, but I am hoping that someone has found a workaround or maybe I am just using Interpret Footage incorrectly.
Here is the problem:
1. Import 20 second long 23.976fps source file into AME
2. Right-click item in Queue and choose Interpret Footage
3. Choose "Assume this frame rate:" and set to 18fps - Duration will update as expected to 0:00:26;19
Results:
Output file will have correctly re-timed active content up to 0:00:20;00 and then hold that frame (which correctly corresponds to 0:00:15;00 from the source file) to the end of the file at 0:00:26;18
Expected results:
Output file should contain the full content of the source file re-timed for the new duration.
NOTE: This behavior will also be apparent in the Export settings Preview window prior to encoding.
Mac OSX 10.7.5
AME: 6.0.2.81 (64-bit)

We are actually generating the files ourselves and keeping them 23.976fps (or 25fps for PAL-country clients). We're interpreting the incoming 23.976fps file as 18fps because that is the speed at which it was shot. Super-8 sound film like most other sound film was 'supposed' to be shot / projected at 24fps, but many shooters used 18fps to get more time out of a 50-foot camera load. Our company provides 24p (or 25p) files to clients, and in addition to providing 1 to 1 representations of their film at 23.976fps, we also provide 24p files with duplicate frames inserted so they are easy to work with in NLEs, yet approximate the correct motion for material that was shot at 12, 14, 16, 18 or 20 fps. Our Apple Compressor workflow works great for the 90+% of material that is silent or is sound film shot at 24fps. We would experiment with moving the entire speed-correction workflow to AME if it solved the 18in24 sound problem, and it _almost_ does. The behavior I described is obviously a bug and not 'works as intended' - it will then be a question of whether such an outside use case gets any attention. If I can come up with another use case that would be more popular, then I might get more visibility for the bug. I suppose that some may wish to batch out 24p files from 25p files using the same technique. That is, throw a pile of 25p files into AME, interpret them as 23.976 and write them out to 24p files. I would expect that the last 4% of those files would show a freeze frame...
Message was edited by: buckbito - typo fix

Using 24p footage and 60i footage together?

Hello,
I am working on a project that will combine 24p footage and 60i footage. What would be the best way to go about combining these two. It's for a short that is shot similar to Cloverfield. I want to use 60i footage for the hand held footage shoot by the actors who are capturing their experience. I'd prefer to have that footage shot on 24p as well and degrade the quality in post, but I don't want to run the risk of them dropping my DVX100a and destroying it. I don't have any experience with 60i, or combining two kinds of footage, so advice is much appreciated!
Thanks!

> that they are not true 30p but really 60i rendered to 30p
Well, I certainly can't speak for all of these cameras, but I have played around with some of this "30p over 60i" footage -- but most of this was from HDV cameras, not AVCHD. Avoid if you can. Basically, the luma is progressive and the chroma is interlaced.
I have a function (it's actually part of the dv2film and hd2sd functions) that will deinterlace only the chroma, so can recover greatly true progressive output... but this is an unmitigated a pain in the *** to deal with all the time, and you certainly lose at least a little chroma resolution. Avoid :)

Need help using 1440x1080 footage in a SD 4:3 timeline

Hi Folks,
I need to use some AVCHD footage in a normal SD 4:3 timeline destined for a dvd. I'm trying to figure out the best workflow. The client provided a usb hard drive with some files extracted from a Sony hdr-sr5. I know the first problem is ingesting these files. I'm on a PPC G5 so I know using the L&T window isn't an option. I have experimented with using Toast to convert the files to ProRes 422 and that seems to work to some degree. I'm probably not doing it correctly because the footage shows up in FCP looking somewhat squished down and with letterbox bars above and below. In Toast the files indicate that they are h.264 1440x1080. When viewing in the Toast Video Player they get 'expanded' to 1920x1080. So I'm not sure why the footage gets letterboxed when converted to ProRes. So I guess that's the first part of the problem.
The second issue is that I just need to use the center crop of the image in a SD timeline. It's just talking head stuff so there's no problem cropping down. But I'm just not sure I understand the correct procedure for doing that once I have the footage ingested in the proper format.
I could definitely use some guidance here as the whole AVCHD thing is new to me.
Thanks,
Chris

Can't help with your first question, but create an sd 4:3 timeline. Drop your hd footage into it. It will come in letterboxed. In the motion tab, remove any distortion, scale and position to your liking

Using 1080i footage in a 720p timeline?

Just curious if anyone out there has used some 1080i footage in a 720p timeline. Does the 1080i stuff convert to 720p very well? Does it look like progressive video? I'm asking because my main camera is the JVC HD100 (720p native) and I want to know if I can match footage from the Sony Z1U (1080i) in a 720p timeline.

Unfortunately, just letting FCP do this will produce pretty unacceptable results, it just drops frames and does not deinterlace.
Shake will do this very nicely, and its recent big price drop makes it an attractive tool to have around. Alternatively, you could use a free utility called MPEG Streamclip from Squared5 (http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html). Among many other conversion tasks, I've used it's downrezing and deinterlacing capabilities to do exactly what you want (Z1U footage to 720p) and it does a very good job.

Resizing 1080 footage in a 720 timeline

I have an interview shot at 1080/30p and my finished product will be 720x1280. I'd like to work in a 720 timeline and take advantage of the extra data in the 1080 footage to punch in occasionally with an edit and resize. I.e. create close-ups even though a close-up wasn't shot by zooming into the footage. My logic tells me that should work so long as I don't go too far.
But when I do this--punching in say 30%--these "close-ups" are soft and/or pixelated even after render or export. Is my logic flawed and this just shouldn't be done?

i've had that experience too. mine was shooting in 1920 and editing in 1280, but i noticed the 1920 when blown up has that look. the best you can do i think to avoid that "soft" look, is to shoot framed in a way that you're maybe an MCU then your edit won't need to be larger to get that CU feel. i don't really know what else to do.

Varicam footage shot at 720/25p

We are working on a 3 hour minseries. About 2/3rd of the footage is original Panasonic varicam shot at 720/25p. The other third will be stock and stills from a variety of NTSC and PAL sources (it's an historical project). I need to end up with a primary PAL version and also a secondary NTSC version. Because I anticipate a lot of rendering to match formats, I'd like to create an offline version with as small files as possible and then conform to an HD PAL format on our fcp.
No one seems exactly sure about the best way to do this. We've been advised to log and capture at DV quality on the fcp. We anticipate a PAL broadcast, so we've been advised to do the offline at DV/50 instead of DV/25. (PAl tv being 50hz.) I'm assuming we can do this from a Panasonic 1200A deck with a direct firewire connection
Then, we've been told, conform the edl at 1080/50i (instead of at 720/25p because most tv stations prefer a 1080 master. This way we would control the upconvert ourselves rather than let someone else do it.
Because this is a large project with many tapes, we'd like to get started in the right way.
Does our plan make sense? What am I not thinking about?
I would love to hear from someone who has actually done this!
Thanks, Chrisk1

You seem to keep asking the same question over and over, but moving the goal posts.
If you would state the facts (about your footage and FCP application) it would save a lot of time and frustration. The pople who anwer questions here are not Apple employees, they are video editors, doing it in their own time, and for no money.
When you CAPTURE the footage from the camera, the FCP settings should be EXACTLY the same as the footage you are capturing from the camera. This way, there is no compression - the compression was done in the camera. You want to avoid further compression if you can.
When you drop the footage onto a timeline, the timeline settings should be exactly as the footage was shot in-camera.
When you then move the project to FCP X, you use the 7toX application to convert the Final Cut Pro PROJECT for use in FCP X.
You do NOT convert the actual media files (in any way) they will be referenced by FCP X in the same way that FCP6 did. 7toX can be used for FCP 6 projects but there may be issues if you have any speed changes:
Only when you output your final movie, should you consider conversion - and if you have grainy night-time stuff, conversion is best avoided if possible.
Certainly avoid (what you repeatedly say you are doing) going from 1080i (interlaced) to 1080p (progressive).
Andy

How to use different video formats in the one timeline?

Hi everyone,
So I am in the middle of stringing together a rough cut for a surf flick/documentary shot in some remote Indonesian islands…
Things so far are going well, but I am slightly confused regarding the best way to tackle a slight issue (hopefully slight!) of video format compatibility.
The main shooting for the film was done with .mov video format and this has been imported/captured into final cut pro 7 using the correct settings, which has now formed the basis for my rough cut.
However, I did a lot of filming with some other cameras (underwater, POV etc) and so also have some crucial footage in different formats that to my knowledge will not be compatible with the timeline that I have already created in FCP.
The files are as following:
AVI
MOD
MP4
I am assuming the best way to go about things is convert all these different files into a compatible form that I can then drop straight into my existing timeline.
Unfortunately, I am just beginning to learn the more techy aspects of editing and I don’t have the first idea of how to go about doing this…?
Any helpful feedback would be greatly appreciated…
Thanks in advance,
m

Although there are kinds of standard workflows for best quality in final product, it helps to know a bit more about your setup... what is your primary format? Without knowing that, the best way forward is to convert all of your footage to Apple ProRes. Especially the MP4 stuff. There are different ways about doing that, but I personally recommend Compressor. This can take some time depending on the amount and lengths of your shots, but it is well worth the process.
Make sure you choose 48k / 16bit AIF for all of your shots that have audio. If some of your footage is 1080p and some is 720p, I personally leave that alone because when you have this type of a difference in footage, I like to set my sequence to 720p giving me the option to move or pan the 1080p clips inside of the 720p sequence. Final Cut Pro is very good at handling that difference.
Hope the edit goes well; sounds like a nice project!

Using hd footage in a 720/480 timeline

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