final cut help

what is prores?

ProRes is an Apple codec designed for roundtrip workflows and HD at a more manageable file size (almost the quality of Uncompressed but at a fraction of the file size). It comes with FCP 6, and it works much better on intel processors.

If you are new to FCP or editing in general, I recommend that you pick up on the training books to get you started. Apple has a training series for Final Cut, Tom Wolsky also has some books available.



www.strypesinpost.com

No i am not new to fcp of editing...i've just never used 'prores.' I'm pretty sure that my hd footage was filmed in 16/9, are you saying if i filmed hd footage in 4/3 it could work on the same timeline as 4/3 sd?

> I'm pretty sure that my hd footage was filmed in 16/9, are you saying if i filmed hd footage in
> 4/3 it could work on the same timeline as 4/3 sd?

HD footage is much larger than the SD frame size. Which means you can place HD footage into an SD timeline and it will more than fill the frame. But you can't do it the other way without penalty -- SD footage is smaller than an HD timeline, and to try to fill an HD frame with an SD clip means you'll have to blowup the SD footage. Blowup equals degradation in the image.

You can't "film HD footage in 4:3". All HD is widescreen 16:9. I suppose you could do what they do in television and use only the center part of the widescreen image while you're composing your images on location, but that isn't what you're asking, is it? There's no reason why widescreen HD footage "couldn't work" on an SD timeline. You just have to do one of the following:

a) Shrink the HD image so that it becomes letterboxed 4:3;
b) Convert the HD image by distorting it to anamorphic 16:9;
c) "Pan-and-scan" the image, losing the sides of the HD image, thereby having no black bars in the 4:3 frame at all;
d) Shrink the HD image even more so there are black bars all around (in the case of promos, commercials etc., projects where you can have "picture-in-picture" techniques).

The one thing to watch out for when using HD footage in an SD timeline is frame rates. HD has a plethora of frame rates, and you could have motion issues when you mix and match within an FCP timeline.


www.derekmok.com

>i've just never used 'prores.'

ProRes is a codec designed by Apple, as there are a lot of HD formats in the market that uses temporal compression (especially the AVC flavours of HD), which becomes very tricky to deal with in post production as they get very processor intensive to work with, leading to long conforming times, render errors, etc... And of course, due to this, a high quality intermediate codec is required in post production, so ProRes is pretty much seen as the solution in the FCP world (I believe DNxHD is Avid's equivalent).

>I'm pretty sure that my hd footage was filmed in 16/9, are you saying if i filmed hd footage in 4/3
>it could work on the same timeline as 4/3 sd?

Yes, it can. All HD is 16:9, as Derek has pointed out. What basically happened here, is that if you're mixing the footage, you're essentially mixing aspect ratios (as your SD is shot in 4:3). Shrinking HD to fit SD 4:3 footage is much better than blowing up SD to fit HD footage (and also since you have so much SD footage, it's easier). If you edit in an SD timeline Final Cut will rescale the HD footage and add a letterbox to the clip and apply a distort filter to preserve the aspect ratio. You can then enlarge it to do a pan and scan (it's still not going to be blown up to more than 100%, so you still get quality).

And yea, next time use "4:3", not "4/3". Proper terminology helps avoid confusion.



www.strypesinpost.com

No i am not new to fcp of editing...i've just never used 'prores.' I'm pretty sure that my hd footage was filmed in 16/9, are you saying if i filmed hd footage in 4/3 it could work on the same timeline as 4/3 sd?

>are you saying if i filmed hd footage in 4/3 it could work on the same timeline as 4/3 sd

There is no such thing as 4:3 HD. You can shoot SD in 16:9 full height anamorphic. Working in the same aspect ratio fits better, as you no longer have to crop off the sides or top to make them fit each other (and also reframing what the DOP shot in the first place). Side or top cropping never really works for me, as sometimes I have stuff at the corner of the frame, or a CU of a person that doesn't look as good once you crop off a portion of the frame. But that is more to do with aesthetics.

You can in fact edit now. Pop the HD into an SD 4:3 sequence, Final Cut will letterbox and scale down the footage, and all you do is to enlarge the footage so it's no longer letterboxed. When you render, Final Cut will conform everything to the codec used in the SD sequence.



www.strypesinpost.com

ok..so if i enlarged the letterboxed hd footage, would there be any quality loss?

> ok..so if i enlarged the letterboxed hd footage, would there be any quality loss?

Huh?

You gotta explain yourself better, my friend.

"Enlarging" any media -- making it bigger than its native size -- will always result in quality loss. The common term is "blowup". If you're "blowing up" 720x480px DV footage to fill a 1920x1080px HD frame, for example. But that doesn't seem to be what you really mean. If you're following strypes' line of thought, then you're not "enlarging" HD media; you are in fact shrinking HD footage down to fit to a smaller (Standard Definition) frame.

Try not to write in such abbreviated spurts. It's really hard to figure out what you're trying to do sometimes, and your terminology can be confusing.


www.derekmok.com

Stripes-"Pop the HD into an SD 4:3 sequence, Final Cut will letterbox and scale down the footage, and all you do is to enlarge the footage so it's no longer letterboxed."

Im not blowing up sd footage. I'm trying to get sd and hd footage to be the same size in a sd timeline. And if you import hd footage into a sd timeline, it letterboxes it, as stripes indicates, so you do indeed have to then enlarge it for letterboxing to not occur.

> so you do indeed have to then enlarge it for letterboxing to not occur.

You're still not "enlarging". You're simply shrinking the HD clip less. But that also doesn't mean there's no "quality loss". There is quality loss in the sense that, because of the SD pixel count, your HD footage will not look as good as if it were being edited in an HD timeline. But an HD clip shrunken to fit an SD frame would look a hell of a lot better than an SD clip blown up to fit an HD frame.


www.derekmok.com

Derek is spot on on both points. I didn't mean an enlargement in that sense (where the frame size exceeds 100%). I meant inserting the HD footage into an SD timeline (which automatically shrinks it down to 75% if you're shooting 720p), then expanding that to fit the SD frame, which should still result in less than 100% frame size. You can check this in the motion tab in the viewer.



www.strypesinpost.com

getting rid of the letterbox is a job for the motion tab unless the letter box was applied in post. This goes back to the +/- 33.33 distortion.

HD in a SD TL will be fit to screen in the same way as a 19/9 movie is played on one of those old glass crt 4/3 tv's.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

correction

HD in a SD TL will be fit to screen in the same way as a 16/9 movie is played on one of those old glass crt 4/3 tv's.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

oh ok, yeah i understand. When i put the distortion back to '0' there still is a tiny black border around the clip.

So all in all i guess it's just a large dillema trying to incorporate hd and sd into the same timeline when trying to create a project for a large target audience because after all this disscusion, which ha s been very helpful, i still am unable to get both hd and sd in the one time line without letterboxing occuring,

set the scale to 101.3 that will knock out the top and bottom edge u are seeing. I just did this a month or so ago so i know what you are going thru.

It's worrisome but once you do its nothing in the future trust me. It's just hard when ya first see it.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

The letterboxing occurs automatically because your HD picture is wider than your SD picture, so FCP is making sure that all of your HD picture fits in the smaller SD frame.

To get rid of the letterboxing, you have to make the picture taller.
When you make the picture taller, you also make it wider, so the left and right edges of the picture go outside the frame.

So you can have either a letterboxed picture with black top and bottom, but all your picture in the frame, or a picture that fills the frame from top to bottom, but is missing some of the picture on the left and right of screen.

To get rid of the letterbox, just use the 'scale' slider in the motion tab.

I set my scale of a hd clip which was in a sd timeline to 101.3...the original scale of the hd clip was was automatically set to 50 so it would fit into the frame. This doubled the size of the frame and became very blurry, so this did not help in anyway.

Yes i am aware that the scale increases the picture, however quality is lost.

Setting it to 101.3 was a mistake. That was incorrect advice. You need to always be careful who you listen to on forums.

Just scale the picture as large as you need it to be to knock out the letterboxing. You can watch the result in the canvas as you scale it.

ok thank you, i thought it sounded weird.

So basically the two choices i now have are:

1. using the hd footage and scaling it so the letterboxing is cut off.

or 2. use the hd footage which my camera converted to dv and once put in the timeline and put to '0' distorion, it fits the screen.

which would be better quality?

yeah it was. thought about that. it is hd footage. mine was just 16:9 when i think of it.
i have distorted and scaled hd footage before. but you have a different situation.

sorry for the 101.3.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

If you've got both kinds of footage, put one copy of each in a sd timeline and see which you prefer. I's going to depend on what you did with the downconversion.

on my laptop screen they both look very similar... I want to put it onto dvd and sell it.

Then burn a small section of both and see which you prefer.