Re: Mixing SD and HD footage in the same timeline

Hi Mike,

When the final delivery is SD, you do NOT want to upscale SD footage to HD, then back down again, it kills the SD clip quality! If you must deliver BOTH DVD and Blu-ray, you could edit in an HD sequence, then create an SD sequence and copy/paste the edits to it to retain the native SD quality for the DVD export.

Before beginning, in Edit> Prefs > General there is a checkbox for "Scale to Frame Size" - if you select this, then any clip you import will automatically match the sequence you place them in. If changing checkbox after import of clips, you can set Scale to Frame manually by right-clicking each clip in timeline.

Note that HD titles do NOT scale in an SD sequence. If memory serves, you can open the title in the titler, hit the button to make "New title based on current", and that copy will be made at the SD frame size, then just right-click the title on the timeline and use Replace with Clip from Bin and that will substitute the SD title copy, pretty painless.

You are correct that if exporting an HD timeline to DVD, use the Max Render Quality setting for best downscale quality, but again, don't incorporate SD footage into HD project for this purpose.

Regarding upscale conversion software, I had purchased the Boris Continuum UpRez Unit software a couple years ago for a project I did and it definitely improved the upconvert quality compared to Adobe scaling. There are likely other options out there as well

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers