Reconciling DH footage with SD

Maty · Dec 8, 2007

Hi everyone,

I have some footage shot for a documentary that, due to conditions, varies between HD & SD. Can I reconcile the two standards to be used in a single project? I imagine it is possible to degrade the HD footage to SD, but is there any method by which I could upgrade the SD footage to HD? (Seems like a long shot, but I thought I might ask...)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, Thanks!

BUmike84 · Dec 14, 2007

I'm sorry that i dont really have an answer for you, but i can guess that it must be possible since they ahve been able to upgrade many movies (like American Graffiti, etc.) from the 70's from SD to HD. You might wanna check into that

esp4ever · Dec 15, 2007

Final Cut Pro 6 has an open format timeline where you can combine SD and HD footage into a single timeline. You may have to simply resize the HD footage to fit the canvas but thats about it as to my knowledge.

MarkG · Dec 16, 2007

Avid is the same; you can just drop DV footage into an HD timeline and it will be upconverted for you.

Tim Kolb · Dec 19, 2007

Is the HD 1920 or 1280?

If the whole thing could be cut as 1280x720 (progressive) that might be a good compromise, but if your source footage is all interlace, I would test whatever editing system you have to see if the conversion is acceptable.

BenB · Dec 29, 2007

It's all very simple. Up-converting from SD to HD will lose image quality. There are third party software packages out there (Nattress makes a great plug-in for FCP that does a great job at this) to help keep image quality during an up-rez.

Down-converting HD to SD looses no image quality, and still looks better than footage originally shot in SD.

"Is the HD 1920 or 1280?" Doesn't matte for this discussion. HD is HD, progressive or interlaced, it's all the same when it comes to the issue of combining SD and HD. SD image size is just WAY smaller than any HD image size. i/p, doesn't matter, that's so easy to deal with for NLEs these days, it's a non-issue.

Do you want your final output to be SD? Drop HD into an SD project. Do you want your final project to be HD? Find something to help up-rez the SD footage to loose as little image quality as you can.