Pan/zoom HDV clips in SD timeline - any tips?

I am editing a two camera shoot - one cam DV SD 16-9 and the other HDV. I am hoping to get some more flexibility with regard to framing/composition by capturing in HDV and then zooming and panning the HDV footage on the SD timeline. Anyone have any advice/tips for me?

Thanks

If your material is 60i, then you will not have great results from pushing in on the down-scaled HDV material. It has to do with how fields are interpolated in Final Cut. Whether the results are acceptable or not depends on, well, you.

So my "advice/tip" would be test.

Yes it is 60i. When the HDV footage is placed in the SD timeline the "shift fields" filter is applied with a value of "+1". Is there any other action recommended to deal with field interpolation?

I am testing - but it does seem that there is a quality hit

also parking the playhead over the clip after applying a filter but before rendering does not yield a still frame full quality preview - but rather the same blurry mess you get when you set RT to play back unrendered footage

Quote

When the HDV footage is placed in the SD timeline the "shift fields" filter is applied with a value of "+1".

That doesn't have anything to do with field interpolation; it's about field order, sometimes called field dominance.

When you shoot interlaced material, your camera records one field, then the other, then the first field again, then the other, and so on. How these fields get divided up into frames ? that is, which pair of fields you show on the screen at the same time ? is fairly arbitrary, but significant. NTSC uses a lower-field-first convention, while HD uses the upper-field-first convention. If you mix lower-field-first and upper-field-first material on the same timeline, you have to shift the fields of one or the other in order to make everything work.

Final Cut does this for you, by applying a "shift fields" filter to the material that doesn't match the field order of your timeline.

Scaling interlaced material is harder, mathematically, than scaling frame-based material. You might get better results by running your HDV stuff through Compressor to convert it to anamorphic NTSC DV. But of course, that removes your ability to reframe your shots.

So I'm going back to "test."

i've done this.

we did a doco a while back which we were finishing SD.
a helicopter shoot was shot HDV,
so we were able to do great zoom-ins and zoom-outs on that footage.

go for it.


nick