downconvert HDV
by Laurie Thomson
on
Jun 14, 2008 at 12:17:02 am
I will be editing a project on HDV for the first time this weekend. When done it needs to be letterboxed to 4:3 to be output back to DV. What is the best way to do this? It will be projected in a theater but they requested not to use 16:9.
Re: downconvert HDV by Don Greening on Jun 14, 2008 at 2:57:22 am
Create your 4:3 sequence. Drag your footage in. FCP will automatically letterbox the footage. Double click your first clip to load it into the viewer. Change the clip size so it fills the top and bottom of the 4:3 frame with the left and right sides of the 16:9 footage out of frame. Hit Command C to copy the clip attributes to the clip board. Highlight all the rest of your clips. Hit Option V. A dialogue box will come up showing you which attributes are available. Choose to keep the frame size (or scale) and click OK. All your clips will be changed to reflect what you did with the first one. Then render and you're done. This process is called a centre cut. Unless you live in the USA then it's called a center cut ;0
Re: downconvert HDV by Tony Whaley on Jun 15, 2008 at 2:11:32 am
Hi there old colleague? If not, ignore that. What I've done to down convert to SD and still maintain letterbox is to output "using compressor", and once in compressor, choose DV-NTSC as the format to convert to. Once you've applied the DV-NTSC format to your item, go into your settings, and I believe it's on the last page of options, choose the one that allows you to letterbox it down to 16:9 for SD (unfortunately, I don't have a Mac at home, so I can't tell you exactly). Once your item has been converted, re-import back into FC, make a copy of your original HDV timeline, and replace the video portion into the copy with the SD letterboxed video. I hope it helps -Tony
