getting mixed resolution video to work

dpottenger wrote on 5/30/2012, 4:19 PM
I have an HD project (video: 1920x1080, 29.970) with a few clips i want to insert which are 1280x720. The clips, once they are dragged onto the timeline, work fine but the preview window has them cropped to less than the full resolution of 1280x720.

I tried using the event pan/crop tool to set the Source parameter of "Stretch to fill frame:" to "No" but I still only see about 70-80% of the video in the preview window. The full frame is visible in the pan/crop window. I've tried almost all the settings in the preview window (draft, preview, good, best) to various settings to no avail.

My goal is to have the smaller resolution video play in a reduced area inside my full HD video frame. Seems like a common thing you would want to do to keep the original quality and aspect ration the same of lesser size video clips.

Any thoughts on how to do this?

BTW, I also have several still pictures with an audio track below the whole thing so there are a mixture of video and still shots in the project. Not that I think this would matter.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/30/2012, 4:26 PM
Best thing to do is in the Pan/Crop window set the width & height values to 1920x1080. You may want to right-mouse-button-click inside the cropping frame first and choose "restore" to undo any settings you've already done, then enter the 1920x1080 values.
Rainer wrote on 5/30/2012, 7:56 PM
Sounds like what you are trying to do is the equivalent of pip. You need to use the track motion rather than event pan crop.
Chienworks wrote on 5/30/2012, 7:58 PM
Pan/crop is exactly the right tool for this, as it lets you specify exactly what size the frame should be that the video sits within.

In general, track motion is often a poor choice because it can resize and resample the pixels twice, resulting in more fuziness.

In this particular case of making sure the 1280x720 source fills 1280x720 of the frame pan/crop will produce the result without any resizing or resampling, preserving the original image.
dpottenger wrote on 5/31/2012, 4:10 PM
I tried both suggestions and the pan/crop tool made sense but I still can not see 100% of the 1280x720 clip. The full image is there in the trimmer and in the pan/crop window but not the preview. I even rendered a small loop to see if it was just my preview window that was wrong but the rendered file also showed the clip truncated (like I was zoomed in so the outer 20% or so of the clip was not visible.)

Btw, I also will want to render this project to standard DVD and probably a Vimeo version at their recommended settings of 1280x720. Not sure what that will do to the final "products" in this case.
Chienworks wrote on 5/31/2012, 5:46 PM
Honestly, i'd rather see the 720 material stretched out to fill the whole screen than have a black border around it.
dpottenger wrote on 5/31/2012, 7:29 PM
Yeah, that would be what I would normally do too but this is a 15 second clip in a ~12 minute video and it is really shaky so it's kind of like embedding a newsreel in a documentary.