I already suspecty what I have to do, but I wanted to check here first. I looked at other threads and wasn't quite satisfied. Anyway, I shot this project for a friend in 720pn 24fps. We didn't finish in time and so when we went back to do pickups we, unfortunately, had to shoot in SD ( money was pretty much non-existant and I rent the p2 cards). So now they start to edit and of course they start to try and put the SD footage in a HD timeline. I told them they needed to down convert the 720p timeline to a 4:3 480i timeline to accommodate the 480 24p.

So my question is: I am right in this aren't I? And if I am, is there a specific way to do it? Other than putting the 720p footage in a 480i timeline.

I understand all the problems with this, but we had no choice, so I would appreciate not getting any lectures. I just need some advice.

Thank you

Mike,

There is a program called Instant HD which is aparently very good at upconverting SD to HD. I've looked into it myself, but haven't had use for it quite yet. The movie files on the site are very impressive though, take a look.

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/instanthd.html

This way you can bring your SD footage into the 720p timeline and finish on HD.

I have used both InstantHD and Resizer2 and am a bit partial to ReSizer.

Keep in mind that you will definitely lose some sharpness doing an uprez from SD (particularly if it is DV) to HD and I really personally only do that if I have short clips to add to HD footage.

Better to downrez the HD to SD and just do this as an SD product. If budget is non-existent, no point in trying to do a Teranex uprez.

Ned Soltz

I have a related question:

I actually WANT to keep the SD footage SD and the HD footage HD so that the look will be very different. Does Final Cut Pro care if I just move from one to the other indiscriminately?

Thanks!

Stephen

Well, your frame sizes are entirely different. What you might do is let FCP do the uprez merely by scaling the SD material. In your timeline options, just specify highest quality scaling. That is, effectively, an uprez to HD because you have just scaled 720x480 to an HD frame size.

Ned

Yeah, I'm going to tell them to put it in SD. It's not going to be broadcast or anything. So what the heck. Next time I'll tell the director to get his shots in either one or the other. It's really not that much of a pain. It's a simple fix.

I didn't know about the uprez software. I check it out.

One more thing. I think final cut is intuitive in the sense that it will down convert the footage to a DV 4801 29.97fps because when I imported a quicktime of my 720p 24fps into the 480i timeline it came up and we were able to edit both HD and SD together.

Correct. The way to downrez is basically just to drop the clip into a DV timeline. The real issues come in uprez-- you basically have to add pixels that aren't there.

Ned