Hi all!

I've got a quick question, I'm collecting footage for a commercial that my store is doing, but its being produced by an outside production company. I'm going to be doing the shoots of the action shots with my XH but they want the footage in the mov format with an 4x3 aspect ratio. I've only ever captured in .mp2 and that is at 16x9.

That being said I have yet to capture (premiere pro) in the mov file type, is it just as simple as a different setting selection when capturing from the camera?

Any thoughts and help are appreciated!

L

XHa1 has a standard-def 4:3 capability if that's what you need....you can convert the output to .mov in quicktime pro or mpegStreamclip once you have it captured from the tape....

If you already recorded the footage in high-definition then you need to down convert the files to 4:3 standard definition. Quality down conversion is difficult and many video editing programs including Premier are known to give poor quality results. A surprisingly good quality can be obtained with Dan Isaacs hs2sd avisynth script. I would recommend using DVCPRO50 as the output video codec in the resulting .mov file.

http://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009/07/hd-to-sd-dvd-best-methods/

Eric-

If I'm understanding you correctly you're saying I need to take the HD footage down to SD just to get them down to 4x3? Can I not just resize the footage in aftereffects and still have the quality. The footage doesn't need to be taken down to SD I just need to alter the aspect ratio of it. Yeah I'll probably lose some stuff on the ends but if done correctly can I conserve the quality that the HDV will provide? We want the highest quality we can get. I could be totally wrong here just my thought.

Almost always HD implies 16:9 aspect ratio and 4:3 implies SD. Since the production company is requesting 4:3, it is a good guess they will be editing and delivering in standard definition. Sending them anything else will only create confusion, delays and expense. To obtain the best quality standard definition from your XHA1, I would recommend cropping the 1440x1080 HDV footage to 1080x1080, rescaling to 720x480 and then encoding to DVCPRO50.

Thanks Eric! I must have gotten confused with the terminology. I appreciate your help!

Depending on what the final format will be, you may save time and get as good a product if you shoot in SD from the start. The XHA1 can do that. Of course having HDV footage may be better for other, later purposes.

I've used TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5 for down converting.

I spoke with the production company handling it, and it appears that I don't need to down convert or anything! Thank goodness it was starting to look quite daunting to say the least! Thanks for all the responses nonetheless!

L