Mixing DVX footage with Widescreen Hi-Def Film on the same timeline

[AQUARIUSDUDE]

We are shooting super 35 and doing a hi def widescreen transfer which equates to 1140 x 1280 resoultion and editing in DVCPRO100 in FCP. We want to mix in DVX footage, what is the best route for doing this.

Should we uprez the DVX footage to hi def 16X9 to match the film footage or perhaps put the film footage in a 4x3 timeline and edit it that way (Which we do not want to do)

So what our question is, is how do we go about mixing these two mediums and what is going to give us the highest possible quality?

Also we realize that these will both have two different editing timebases that could mess us up, what is the best solution for that, and fianlly should we shoot the DVX in squeeze mode or get an anamorhic adapter because if we do uprez it it will need to be 16 x 9 right?

So if any of you awsome gurus have any info to help us out that would be great!!

Thanks

 

[negativeDP]

I've played around a little bit with miniDV footage in a HD timeline, here's what I've come up with. First off, what footage are you using the most? Is it going to be mostly super35 or miniDV? That right there should answer your question about which timeline to edit in. If it's going to be mostly miniDV and is only going to be played on nothing more than a standard TV, then stick to a miniDV timeline. If you are using mostly super 35, then don't hurt that beautiful footage by compressing it into a 4:1:1 720x480 shot, keep it as high rez as possible and uprez the DVX.

Now, I personaly would never use squeeze mode, I'd rather crop it in post because I think squeeze looks worse. If you have an anamorphic adapter, you're retaining a lot more information, limited on what you can do with the lense, but at the end of the day you're still recording a 4:3 image at a 720x480 resolution and you are still going to have to uprez it in the HD timeline, what is one to do? Well, you could just stretch it out in the window, that's one way, but final cut will blur it making a soft image, plus it will have some nice jaggies.

A real nice way that I have found, which I think I originally read about it on dvxuser is to actually uprez the resolution frame by frame in an awsome program called PHOTOZOOM PROFESSIONAL, which you can download a working demo that puts watermarks on the image, but works for testing.

Here's how I would do it, but again, do some test to see what works with you best, take your anamorphic video at export it out as anamorphic .tiff images. FC will save this as like, woods 01.tiff - woods 300,tifff, however many frames there are to the shot. Batch these together into photozoom, put in the resolution you want (make sure keep aspect ratio is unchecked, so that photozoom will bring it to the 16x9 image), put the resize method to s-spline, play with the detail preset, watch the magic and save them as uprez .tffs

When this is all said and done, open your registered version of quicktime, import all the .tffs, thus creating a movie and then export as an HD video file, taking ungodly amounts of hard drive space on the way, import that into your project and drop it into your HD timeline. Now, if you want to, drop in the original miniDV file and stretch it out and see the difference. photozoom will be one of the best $200 or whatever dollars it cost you'll spend!

Now, I've only had the pleasure of working with some very short HD clips given to me to play with, but this worked great for me. However, Make sure you color correct AFTER you uprez the image, there's more pixels to work with now, plus, again, you're working in a 4:2:2 environment, not a 4:1:1. I could be wrong about that whole last bit, but it makes sense in my head! Anyways, good luck, let me know what worked best for you.