Struggling with HD - Convert to SD - HELP!

[Film Division]

PAL 720pn / 25

I am converting my footage from MXF to AVI using Serious Magic DVCPro HD Decoder. I now want the easiest way to convert that HD footage to SD for editing in Premiere Pro. My hardware struggles with editing HD clips and I don't need HD clips, the end project is always exported at SD anyway.

I'm trying to learn Premiere Pro and finding that none of my hardware is really up to HD editing.

Please help me.. :badputer:

 

[Nektonic]

Take the HD AVI clip, and import it into a new 4x3 SD project. When you drop it onto the timeline, it will be blown up big in the preview monitor. Go to the MOTION function in the EFFECTS CONTROL window, and reduce the size with the scaling tool. I shoot on an HDV camera with a resolution of 1440 x 1080, and reduce my clips to 34.6 percent in the scaling tool. I am not sure what scaling percent 720p footage will need, so experiment. Next just render out. This gives me a Letterboxed 4x3 DV clip. You could always do a pan-n-scan version as well.

The same basic technique applies if you want to downconvert to 16x9 SD, but with a different scaling percentage.

This method was suggested to me by others for downconverting in Premiere Pro 2.0. The reason to do this is to get crisp clean SD results. You can always just render out an SD file from your HD timeline, but I have found that doing that gives inferior results to the above method.