I will be starting to film a documentary about the Nuclear SHip Savannah very soon. I have decided to use my 2 FX1's and shoot in 1080i60 HDV. I will also be using a lot of archival footage which is 4x3 SD.
Now, a lot of people are telling me to shoot in HD because I can always deliver in SD. How should I go about editing this? SHould I edit on a HDV sequence to edit both of my HD and SD footage? Also, what about when it comes time to render to dvd? If I am going to be be delivering on a regular SD dvd, do I need to convert anything or just render as an mpeg 2?
Re: Editing HDV in FCP by Jeff Carpenter on May 7, 2008 at 2:52:38 pm
You have 3 popular choices here:
1) Capture and edit as native HDV
2) Capture and edit as Apple Intermediate Codec
3) Capture and edit as ProRes
(I suggest 2 or 3.)
In all cases, put your 4x3 material in those sequences and blow them up to the point where they have black bars on the right and left. You could fill those in with a graphic or animation of some sort.
Then, at the end, you just export from the timeline using compressor. It goes straight to MPEG II. Set the Compressor preset as 16x9 and you'll get an anamorphic, widescreen 720x480 MPEG II for DVD.
Use the track settings in DVD Studio Pro to tell the player if you want it to play the track as letterboxed 16x9 or to crop it to 4x3. You can even set it so that it crops it to 4x3 on 4x3 sets and plays it widescreen on widescreen sets.
Re: Editing HDV in FCP by Damion Demeter on May 9, 2008 at 10:04:25 pm
I've never had the need to mix the two types of video personally, but the above suggestion is one I have read that works well and you'll notice a lot of hd channels doing this with the graphic (such as espn).
However, one article I read (I believe it was on ken stones page) talks about a technique where you center the 4:3 image on your hd viewer. You then create a still frame and put it on a timeline below it. You give it some blur to make sure it doesn't distract from the video, but it gives an illusion of the 4:3 footage filling the 16:9 frame.
The examples I saw on the site looked pretty slick. If I ever had the need, I think I would try that option. Look it up on ken stones page for more specfics, but you might want to try it. :)
Re: Editing HDV in FCP by Andrew Kimery on May 11, 2008 at 6:43:07 pm
If you are using FCP 6 you can also edit as HDV natively but change your render settings to ProRes. It's a way to keep working w/HDV sized files, but still get much of the quality benefit of working w/ProRes.
Douglas Spotted Eagle's link is a very good one showing all the different ways you can get creative when needing to add 4x3 content into a 16x9 project.
Re: Editing HDV in FCP by Lee Berger on May 12, 2008 at 1:04:06 am
I agree. I'm currently working on an hour documentary, editing in native HDV and rendering in ProRes. The render times are reasonable on my Dual G-5 2.0. Keep in mind that your render files will be ProRes sized and not HDV sized.
