Changing a sequence from NTSC to HDV and back again

I've always had a problem with this type of stuff.

Right now I'm editing a scene shot in HDV. Recently, for a class critique, I assembled all my sub-sequences into a rough assembly and outputted it to DVD.

In order to do that, I set the rough assembly sequence as NTSC. So, the original footage is HDV, but when cut into this sequence, black letterboxing appears in the NTSC sequence's 4:3 frame.

The problem now is:

1) if try to add anything into this sequence it requires an "orange" render (presumably because my computer is too slow to do the HDV-to-NTSC render on the fly like a faster computer)

2) when I go to copy/paste the clips from the NTSC sequence back into a HDV sequence, all the clips get resized in a ridiculous and distorted and smaller way



Tiger powerbook 1.25 768MB FCP5

You should not be trying to make changes to the NTSC (DV?) sequence. Go back to your original "sub-sequences", as you call them, to do your editing and changes. "Intermediary" timelines are used all the time by editors to make outputs, do presentations, etc., but you should dump them once the presentation is done.

that's great, and I suppose I will do that in order to keep moving, but I was wondering if anyone knew the cause of the problem I am experiencing, and a solution--as opposed to a workaround.



Tiger powerbook 1.25 768MB FCP5

> I was wondering if anyone knew the cause of the problem I am
> experiencing, and a solution--as opposed to a workaround.

It's not a workaround. When you reframed and resized your HDV footage to fit into an NTSC frame size, all those settings were retained, so copying the clips back to an HDV frame size did not make a difference. No experienced editor will try to change the edits in a timeline that was intended strictly as a middle step for one single, temporary output.

If you really insist on keeping the clips that had been modified for the NTSC timeline, then paste them back into an HDV timeline, select the clips and press OPTION-APPLE-V (Remove Attributes) to remove the scaling and repositioning on the clips. However, that's a very silly and unnecessary way to approach this, because any resizing or repositioning that was an intentional part of the edit will be removed as well.

Next time you do this, don't make edit changes to the NTSC timeline, and don't copy the actual clips (edits) over. Either export a movie file of the HDV timeline and import that into an NTSC timeline, or nest the sequence into an NTSC timeline. You can resize/reposition that for output purposes, and then ditch the NTSC timeline when it's time to go back to editing.

Whoever's teaching you guys Final Cut Pro at your school should explain how to do this stuff rather than let you guys feel your way around on your own. It's not very responsible teaching.