Re: Transcoding

[Aliya Ayyildiz] "however I'm planning on buying a 4K projector and would like my video to play at that quality] "

You actually mean "play at that format" and not "play at that quality", right?

Welcome to Creative COW, Aliya.

So, you need to up-convert your cell phone and Macbook Pro camera movies to HD. You're actually doing it right by creating an HD timeline first and then dragging the standard def stuff in afterwards. Once your edit is complete it's just a simple matter of rendering the timeline and you'll be ready to export a completed movie of your project. Your SD clips will be converted to HD during the rendering process. Make sure your HD stuff is displaying at the correct field order if it's interlaced material and that the standard def stuff is also displaying properly at the correct field order. Most of the time FCP recognizes the different formats and displays everything correctly but just check to make sure. You can do this by going to the Browser window and checking the field order for each of your clips in the Field Dominance column. Clips that display the incorrect field order look awful.

[Aliya Ayyildiz] "What i want to know is, is there a way that i can actually upgrade the quality of the videos to HD, as in "convert" all my videos to HD quality [or to the highest possible quality like 2K] before even beginning to edit in FCP? "

The short answer is no. It's generally accepted that you can never improve on the original source material, otherwise video people would all be running around with video cell phones and upconverting with software afterwards. Sure would save on equipment costs, but alas......

Taking a small frame size like standard definition and spreading it out over a much larger frame size only adds to the poor quality issue. But you have to work with what you've got, so highlight a piece of your SD footage in the timeline and render it, which will create a new HD file. The rendered file may look a little better.

Sorry for sounding like such a big fat pessimist here but the expression "garbage in garbage out" still applies.

- Don