Advice on editing HD footage & 4.3 16mm stock footage together?

A

andrew00

Well-known member
Hey,

So a client wants me to edit some stock footage of vietnam combat, which was shot 16mm 4.3 and comes to me as a MOV file at a resolution of 720x480 and 29.97fps DVCPRO NTSC (It's labelled PAL but inspector begs to differ!),

He wants it intercut with a live video I shot of the band on my EX1 at 1080P 25fps.

I'm struggling to find the right settings on FCP and to figure out the best thing to do to marry the footage.

I was going to go into FCP, create a PAL DV timeline at 25 fps, import the 30fps NTSC Vietnam footage and just export it as a DV 25fps video, letting FCP do all the necessary converting. I know a mate has one of the Natress plugins for converting so that's also an option I suppose.

However, I don't know what the best setting options for this PAL format are in FCP.

It seems FCP only likes PAL video that is 4.3, not 16.9, at least I can't see an easy option for non-hd 16.9.

I'm thinking maybe the best idea is to bring the footage into a normal XDCAM 16.9 1080P timeline, then just export it out there as enlarged HD footage, edit the whole thing in HD, both the enlarged footage and my native EX1 footage, then export again the whole thing in HD.

THEN convert to SD once the entire process is done, thereby reducing the size of the footage down to a familiar resolution.

What do you think?

Cheers!
a x
 
So I tried converting it by bringing it into my XD CAM timeline, scaling it up so it was enlarged enough to cover the widescreen boundaries and exported it through Quicktime movie as a 1080P video w/cropping option ticked.

Yet it came out stretched, rather than cropping off the top it stretched the wide wide but maintained the original height.

Not sure what I did wrong there!

That being said, I'm unsure if I even NEED to export it, as long as it's scaled up and can play at that scale then can I just edit as is?
 
If you're going to crop, I would try doing an uprez with Compressor. It'll do a better job (by far) of upsacling and the NTSC>PAL conversion than FCP. Just turn frame controls on and wait a while.
 
Ok currently doing an upres (it's taking bloody ages!) in Compressor.

I selected Pro Res 422 (as I thought it'd be a good place to start, can convert easily to others from this if needed) and 25 fps (from 30).

Dimensions wise I selected custom 4:3 and increased the width to 1920, the height ended up around 1500ish I think, which means I'll have video of the same width, I can crop not scale up.

Under Frame Control I selected Best (stat prediction) for resize filter, output fields being Progressive and deinterlaced of motion compensated.

Hopefully those settings are a good choice, thou prob I could have gotten away with a less quality conversion but whatever!

a x
 
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