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MillimeterIntegrating DV Source Footage into HDV Projects, Part 1
Dec 10, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Figure 5. Final Cut Pro automatically scales SD video you insert in an HDV project. Yes, that’s me, and I parred the hole!
Click here for a larger image
Workflow
Finally, let’s discuss workflow. If you’re just adding snippets of SD B-roll to an HD project, you should be able to import the SD video into the project, then zoom it to the desired size. As I mentioned, Final Cut Pro will even scale it for you, as you can see in Figure 5. Interestingly, Final Cut Pro defaults to letterboxing when zooming, the most conservative option, because it neither crops information or distorts.
There are a number of instances when you’ll have to scale before adding the SD content to your project. These include:
- If you’d like to scale with Algolith AlgoSuite, which doesn’t work in either Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro (it does work in both ReSizer and Instant HD).
- If you need to produce video for Final Cut Pro’s multicam tool, which must be the same resolution and codec as the other footage.
- As mentioned earlier, if you’d like to de-interlace in Compressor rather than Final Cut Pro.
In all these instances, you’ll have to render a separate file, then re-import that back into your project. Obviously, if you’re producing a file for Final Cut Pro’s multicam tool, you need to render in the same format as the other videos. Otherwise, I did most of my testing on the Macintosh and used Apple’s ProRes 422 HQ, which worked just fine. I defaulted to the Apple Animation codec for Windows, which produced extraordinarily large files, like 7GB for 1 minute, compared to about 1.3GB for ProRes.
That’s it for now; in the next issue, we discuss quality.
