Hi, using Premiere Elements 7 on WinXp and also on Win 7.

I wonder if it's possible for us to do a pan and scan type process with our HD video? I ask because someone gave me some footage from the weekend where the composition was way too wide and large and I'd like to save the video, composed better, an SD quality.

Given the pixel resolution it should be possible. I know that's how they convert 35mm film to fit TV, but when it comes to video, can Premiere do it?

I can crop video in premiere but it will save the video at the same resolution, but all pixelized and looking wonky. How would I save 1080i video pan and scanned to 720 (p) or regular SD (640) which will still look decent on Youtube.

Here is an example (note, I also squeezed the footage to 97% horizontally first):

http://www.vancouversocialboard.com/wp-content/themes/thesis_16/custom/images/pan-scan.jpg

Can anyone give a tutorial?

Thanks

Hi Ronald. I use Premiere Pro but what I do is create a project in SD then import the HD footage. When placed in the timeline it comes in at 100% (too big for the screen) so I just scale it to what I need. Is that any help?

Sadly it didn't work.

The moment I scale it larger, it loses sharpness.

I would assume there is a way to crop/get 640x480 out of 1920x1080. Even cropping doesn't work, it still leaves a black area in the viewable area.

Anyone have any ideas?

When you say the image is poor, are you looking at a render, or just the timeline preview? With PPro, I regularly expand footage on an HDV timeline up to 135% or so, and while it looks bad on the timeline, when rendered to SD, it looks fine.

There could possibly be a problem with some particular formats. I recall some versions of Cineform didn't scale right, but that was in the past.

it was with a render (exported video).

Steve Grisetti, author of Muvipix.com Guide to Adobe Premiere Elements 7 gave me the answer. He wrote:

"If it's hi-def video, you can import the video into a project set up for standard DV.

Before you use Get Media to get the video, go to Edit/Preferences and uncheck Scale to Frame Size.

When you place your video on the timeline, it will be much larger than the Monitor, and you will only see a portion of it. You should be able to use Crop and Scale to get just what you need and still have many pixels to spare. (And don't forget to press Enter to render the video before you judge its quality.)

Note that, depending on what format of video your original footage is in, you may need to work with the interlacing maybe reverse the field dominance. So I'd do a short test run and output to see how it looks before I committed to a full-length project."