I´m planning to shoot and edit an documentary in HDV (25F PAL). The thing is that I want to include some material that is shoot in SD from some old MiniDV-tapes. Is it possible to include the material in my HDV project or do I have to downconvert the HDV-material to SD before I edit?
I have an Canon XH-A1 and an Apple Powerbook PowerPC.

I tried this last year and could never get it to work right. But what I did one one clip this year is I put it into Serious Magic Ultra, and then outputted it into CHFD 1920X180. Worked like a champ!!!!!!!

Dave

A year ago I built an HDV project that included some scaled-up SD/DV material. The latter was from a decidedly consumerish camera. The material looked fine in my HDV monitor window (Matrox Parhelia APVe + ext 21" HDTV monitor), that is, it looked no worse than normal SD material. However if anyone wanted an SD copy of the material (ie uprezed then downrezed), the DVD output really looked terrible to me. For the downrez I used CineformAccessHD to output 480x720 per their instructions. That does a wonderful job on HDV material....just not upscaled SD stuff.

Thank you for your answers. Yesterday I made a test and imported some SD footage to my HDV project and it worked. The problem is that the image size is about half of what is was from the beginning.
I heard about a FX-plug for FCP called "Resizer". Maybe that program that solve the problem.

You need no external plugin to resize the material in PremierePro. With the clip highlighted in the timeline, go to the EffectControls tab in the monitor window. Twirl down the "Motion" tab. Then adjust scale to the factor you need. If your SD footage was 4:3 you may want to put "black video" underneath it. If you want to expand 480 tall material to 1080, the scale would be 225% (1080/480). As I said in the previous post, this magnifies the material, artifiacts and all. It will look fine in HD (ie no worse than it was). If you then downres to DVD (output with Cineform to 480x720 progressive) I found the material much softer than the native footage. I recommend progressive for downrezed 1080i HDV footage to you do not get square edged motion blur artifacts on less than perfect pans. There is plenty of data in a 540x1440 HDV field (half frame) for 480x720 for this.

I just recently did a video for a client mixing my HD footage with their DV footage. I bought Instant HD for pp2($99, i think) to resize the dv footage and wow it came out great. It has a little stretch effect on their footage but they were extremely please with the final outcome

Premiere upscaling/downscaling algorithm is not one of the best, especially when footage is interlaced...

If you want to uprez for free, you can use Squared 5's Mpeg Streamclip(www.squared5.com) to uprez, downrez, cross-convert, or encode all kinds of formats into other ones. Of course, it's a standalone program, so you have to use it first, then import the result into your NLE. I took DV footage and converted it to HDV, and it looked fine to me. Mpeg streamclip uses a "2D-FIR scaler," whatever that is. Graeme Nattress, who designs conversion and film effects filters (www.nattress.com), told me it was suberb software and the correct way to scale footage "if you're not into freeky advanced techniques." Any other processing or color correction could be done by something else.

NewTek´s SpeedEdit has one of the best scalers I´ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Up and down, the quality is superb. No need to upres before bringing material in. Another great thing about it is no matter what your project's set at, when you render out your timeline at a different resolution it works with the originals as if the project had been originally set at that specific resolution, thus effectively eliminating the upres/downres problems mentioned earlier. You can even work on a 30P project with interlace material, and if you render out as progressive, it'll deinterlace the non progressive material, but if you render out at interlaced or 60P, it'll use both fields for best results. All in real time of course.