Using Compressor to Resize Video?

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petruzzo

New member
First post here, folks. I'm a professional photographer, but I'm just getting into film stuff. Looking foreword to getting involved.

My question for the moment, which I'm hoping someone can help me with, I have a lot of Canon 5D footage that needs to be resized from 1080p down to 480, then resampled back to 1080p. Does anyone know if that can be done in Compressor? And if so, where abouts might I look to do that?
 
Welcome to DVXUser!

It can be done... but why? You do realize that taking it down to 480 then back to 1080 is going to destroy the video quality, right?

For the technical answer: there are presets for all sorts of codecs with all sorts of frame sizes. Whichever preset you use, that's the frame size that you'll end up with. There are some presets that are based on "current frame size," which will output the same frame size you started with, but those are mostly codecs for Internet distribution. If you aren't sure of the frame size, click on a preset in the Settings window and then look at the information that comes up in the Inspector window.

But back to the question of "why?" If your intent is to destroy video quality, then you're on the right track. But if there's some other reason you feel the need to drop to SD, then up-rez back to HD, perhaps there's a better means to your desired ends?
 
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C2V said:
Welcome to DVXUser!

It can be done... but why? You do realize that taking it down to 480 then back to 1080 is going to destroy the video quality, right?
Click to expand...

Thanks! :)

Yes, I do realize that. It's actually the point. I'm using a series of filters in FCP and Motion to help mimic the look of 90's broadcast TV, but with the resolution so high, it's just never convincing. Or, I haven't found a way to make it so. So I figured I'd do it the dirty way by actually reducing the resolution. If you have a suggestion for how to accomplish this without resizing, I'm absolutely open to it.
 
So I've been scouring Google looking for some tips to accomplish this and I'm just turning up a lot of nothing. In fact, I can't find a whole lot about Compressor to begin with. Do you think you could give me a good nudge in the right direction? Or a full blown tutorial. Either way, I'd be very grateful. :)
 
why not just run it through compressor twice. once down to 853x480 (thats 16x9 res) and then again back to 1080.

theres also a "bad tv" filter in FCP, might be worth playing around with.

remember also, theres no reason to even export in 1080 after you've downconverted, so you dont really even need to bother upconverting it or even uploading an HD version after that. just a waste of data and download time for the end user.
 
petruzzo said:
Thanks! :)

Yes, I do realize that. It's actually the point. I'm using a series of filters in FCP and Motion to help mimic the look of 90's broadcast TV, but with the resolution so high, it's just never convincing. Or, I haven't found a way to make it so. So I figured I'd do it the dirty way by actually reducing the resolution. If you have a suggestion for how to accomplish this without resizing, I'm absolutely open to it.
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm missing something here, but was video quality really that bad in the 90's?
We were using products like Sony D1, D2, DigiBeta, HDCAM, which looked pretty darn good.
 
One thing you might want to play with in that process is interlacing the footage at some point, and see if there are ways to really emphasize the scan lines.
 
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