Uprezzing a AE composition from SD to HD

Hello everyone,

Im helping online a documentary in which there's a short collage sort of composition, ala David Hockney, but moving. It was designed at the offline stage, in SD NTSC 720x480. It's made from about 90 clips, in a composition fittingly set at SD NTSC as well. Now at the online stage, I have to uprezz it to full HD 1080.

The obvious way to do this would have been doing it in HD all along and just export it into SD for the offline edits, alas, this was not so. I've recaptured my 90 clips in FCP at the desired online quality, and then went to AE, hoping that when i reconnected the 90 clips, it would manage to spread them out across the canvas in proportion to it's new dimensions. Obviously didnt happen, so im now pretty much rebuilding it from scratch.

Is there any way to make AE understand that it's just an uprezz and make it spread everything out accordingly? Im guessing no, and i've got time to do it from scratch anyway, but i thought i'd let this thing out here and see if there's anything i havent thought about.

Oh and one more thing: This eventually has to go through compressor and be turned into a clip running at 23,976 (instead of its original 29,98). So far, im doing it at 29,97 all the way through and let compressor figure it out, but now i have my doubts. Would it be better to turn every clip into 23,98 before, and work in AE already at that framerate?

Thanks!

Hello Dave,
Thanks a ton for the quick response. I'll have compressor churn out all the clips at 23,976 (and yeah, i was saying 23,98 as in the nickname, not an actual usable frame rate).

Again, thank you!

The scale them using parenting would have worked if it were just a scaling issue, but there's the spacial issue as well, both in X and Y planes. I guess there's some way to use math and expressions and parenting to make AE calculate were each clip should be, but it was easier to just do it from scratch.

The "turn them into 3D layers and push the camera in" would have worked great, but they already are 3D, and have a camera panning through them.

Thanks anyway Michael!