Pan & Scan an HD clip in an SD Timeline

MarcM

Active member
Can anyone suggest the best workflow for this. I'm getting a new HD camera soon. However, much of my work is still in SD. Is there any problems with editing all SD footage in an SD timeline (widescreen of course) with the occasional HD clip edited in and scaled down to about 46%, depending on whether 720 or 1080 this % will differ. Anyway, I'd like to zoom in on the HD clip. Seems logical that I can zoom into the clip until 100% scale is reached before losing any SD quality.

Has anyone tried this and how well does it work? I can see how field order could screw with things but if it's all say 30P (29.97P) then will I eliminated the possibility of upper/lower field wonkyness?

Anyone have any samples of doing this?

Ive been very excited about this idea since I saw the director of that Alice in Wonderland movie with Jonny Depp talk about how they did the red queens big head. He said they shot it in 4k then edited for 1080. He said they just scaled up the actress' head and since they started in 4k they lost no quality in 1080 and had plenty of picture information to to scale it up.

How many others are doing this?

Here's part of an interview with Carey Villegas, a visual effects supervisor on this film:
"We would shoot the Red Queen with the Dalsa in 4K and then we would re-size the plate all the way down to this pseudo rez which was 2160 x 1080. Essentially, we moved it down to what would be a centre extraction from the Panavision Genesis camera. So for the Red Queen we would scale down the whole plate – her body and her head and everything – and we would also have the non-scaled down version and we would re-attach her head from the non-scaled version back onto the scaled-down version. Effectively, we got a 90 per cent blow-up from that mix without doing a blow-up at all.

Anyone interested, here's the whole interview:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/alice_in_wonderland/

Thx
 
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Well, you're not working with 4K, you're not working with a Dalsa, and you're not working with the hardware/software combinations they had to create that effect. You're working with desktop software and whatever 1080 camera you're going to get, which is going to be sub-$10K or sub-$5K or less, correct?

You would think you'd be able to zoom into 1080 on a 480 timeline until it's a one-for-one pixel equivalency and not lose anything, but it doesn't actually work that way. A non-zoomed 1080 image still looks better on an 480 timeline than if it's zoomed in. You will notice a difference.

Does it still look as good as 480? Maybe; depends on the footage and on the quality of the scaler.
 
Hi Marc, you can downscale your HD to SD timeline all you want and it will look pretty good. To pan and scan it using Adobe Premiere just open up the effects panel and keyframe your zoom in combination with your position (horizontal and vertical). You can use easy ease options on your nodes incase you need to ramp up or ramp down your pan 'n scans and want them to stay smooth.

I use this technique occassionally for reframing shots when I've added black bars in post, its smooth and easy to use once you get the hang of it.

Cheers,
 
I just did a project like this: shot in 1080 (30p) Delivered in 480i (DVD).
I ended up scaling much of it quite a bit because they ended up wanting it tight. Playing the DVD on a SD 32 inch CRT tv it looked pretty normal. Not quite as good as it could have but thankfully good enough in my case.

Anyone know of a way to easily keep a roaming/active speaker in frame short of constantly keyframing changing positions?
1080 is so much bigger than 480, it's a pain in the neck to keep the subject in the screen when it's originally shot with various styles of framing. And when its several hours long that's a lot of keyframing.
 
Pretty easy to do with AE & mocha. Track in mocha. Use the smoothing tools to clean up the keyframes. Or maybe just some light expressions (ease/smooth the direction changes). If it's shot on a tripod you might be able to just use the X and drop any Y changes. Worst case you'd have to clean up a handful of keyframes.
 
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