I am trying to sort out the cleanest workflow on this. My original footage is 1080p and final delivery will both 720p, and 480 on SD DVD. I have some clips that I sent to motion to stabilize (which came out amazingly good). I now need to crop them to get rid of the black on the sides from the clip getting stabilized and I am unsure of when in the workflow to crop. My timeline sequence is 1080p. All editing, CC, titling, etc. is finished and the only thing left is to take care of the cropping on these clips, and send to compressor for delivery.

Does anyone know, at this stage of the game, should I just crop them, or should I first copy this sequence into a 720p sequence? I am wondering which will get a better look, and I will try both and see for myself, but am unsure if there are known reasons to do do one over the other. The main concern I have is keeping to footage as sharp as possible, and I know I have extra resolution available going HD to SD, just want to get it right.

Thanks

I don't think you mean crop... If your footage is black and doesn't exist outside of those areas, cropping would still only give you a black image.

What you're talking about is Zooming. You'll likely create a basic zoom and an origin shift to avoid those pesky black areas. This does indeed soften the image. The good news is your are downconverting. So, cut in 1080p, zoom in 1080p then output.

The other option is to create a new sequence without your treated clips. This sequence would be 720p. Drop in your 1080p treated clips, zoom in 720p.

I'm for the first method because I'm not sure your average viewer would ever spot the difference.

Anyway - hope this helps,
-C

I'm not sure how Final Cut deals with downsizing compared to uprezzing, but in general super sampling (going down) should always look better than going up then going back down.

As such without tests on your footage (which is what you should do, follow the workflow for two clips and compare results) I would hazard a guess that the 'sharper' result with least chance for aliasing or artifacts would come from putting the footage straight into a 720 timeline and changing the scale settings until the black bars are out of frame.

Use the scale control in the Motion tab of your clips.
Noah

What Noah said ^^^^^ (easy)

Right, that's the easy part. I was curious if I should do that from within a 720 timeline, or in the 1080p timeline and then export as 720p. It looks pretty good going right from the 1080p timeline (other than any moving text in titles). I am going to try the other way and compare later today.