Mixed footage advice required

Tim Stannard wrote on 8/4/2015, 2:21 PM
A couple of friends (both perfectly competent cameramen) shot my daughter's wedding last Saturday and have provided me with the footage to edit and I'm after advice as to how best to deal with it as they are different resolutions and frame rates.

Camera A: GH4 4K footage 4096 x 2160 24P AVC
Camera B: Nikon D8100 HD 1920 x 1080 25P AVC

There are two potential problems, the very different aspect ratios and the differing frame rates (please just live with the fact that the guy with the GH4 insisted on shooting 24P)

Destination is BluRay and DVD.

Normally I'd set timeline to the "main" camera or higher res camera which is Camera A here (both in terms of the shots and the resolution), but in doing so I will have to expand & crop the lower resolution Camera B footage (if I want it to fill the frame). As I am looking to produce nothing greater than 1920 x 1080 though, this seems counter intuitive and I feel I should set up the project to match the 1080P footage.

As for the fps, would I be better converting it prior to editing (and any tips on how best to do so)?

Comments

astar wrote on 8/4/2015, 4:29 PM
1. - I would run some tests on rendering the 24P footage to 4096-2160 XAVC-I 25P. If that looks good and no odd issues with the frame rate conversion, up-res the Nikon footage to a 3840x2160p XAVC-I profile**. Edit the resulting XAVC-I files, and proxy edit if you need to. Pan/Crop the Nikon footage*** to match the aspect of the 2160p, and adjust the frame up of down to find a good frame. Final render the project in 4096x2160p XAVC-I for long term archival.

**You could just use the .MOV files on the timeline and let the render sort things out, but I just like getting all source footage in the same format. Mainly this is for stability reasons, and sorting out issues with footage before reaching the final render stage.

***You can do this reframing of the Nikon footage during the conversion stage, so you do not have to it during editing.

2. - Then take that rendered output in a new project, render it to Blue-Ray specs, and burn a disc.

Since it is your daughters wedding, its a labor of love. HD is going to look like standard def in 5-10+ years. I think It would be best to work the project at 4k for archival reasons. If you were doing this pro, I would edit it in HD for speed.

If you want to edit this HD, I would use the same process and convert all the footage to HDCAM-SR-LITE. Render the conversions in FP32 Video Levels mode, then switch back to 8-bit for editing the resulting files. Obviously do any color correction, or effects settings in 32bitVL mode best/full. Final render in HDCAM-SR-LITE in 32-bit Video Levels best/full. Goto step 2.
balazer wrote on 8/4/2015, 11:51 PM
Edit everything in a 1920x1080 project and crop the GH4 to 16:9. The aspect ratios are not that different. You'll barely notice that little bit of cropping.

They're not both competent cameramen if they chose those frame rates knowing the footage was for you. You'll have to just pick a frame rate - 24 fps, or 25 fps if you are in a PAL country. Vegas will do the frame rate conversion automatically. It won't look good if there's much motion, but it will probably be o.k. if the camera was locked down on a tripod.

Better quality conversion would involve speeding up or slowing down one camera's footage to match the other camera. But that introduces a lot of complication over what to do with the audio. You don't want a mix of normal audio and pitch-shifted audio.

Motion compensated frame rate conversion is another option, but it's less than perfect and very slow.
Tim Stannard wrote on 8/5/2015, 1:17 AM
Thanks both. I'll run a couple of tests based on your advice.
balazer - you're right about the cameramen, of course, by "competent" I meant their individual footage is good rather than being that of random wedding guests (no hosing, no overs exposure, steady etc)
Chienworks wrote on 8/5/2015, 7:18 AM
"speeding up or slowing down one camera's footage to match the other camera"

That's going to introduce a much huger complication than syncing the audio. It makes the speeds different. This may not be too bad if you're simply grabbing various scenes from each camera and doing an assemble edit, though in that case the audio sync doesn't matter either. But, if you're trying to do a multicamera edit and cut back and forth between the two then running at different speeds makes this task just about impossible.

Whichever frame rate you choose, i would disable resample on the other camera's video. With resample on Vegas will blend frames together causing ghosted, double images which looks very ugly and distracting. With it off Vegas will simply drop or duplicate one frame per second, which should be nearly unnoticeable, especially with slow movement typical in wedding.
Tim Stannard wrote on 8/5/2015, 1:15 PM
Thanks Kelly. I'd forgotten about turning off resampling. I really, really should have mentioned the audio source is separate, audio from camera only being used for sync purposes (at least for the church service)

balazer wrote on 8/5/2015, 4:08 PM
" But, if you're trying to do a multicamera edit and cut back and forth between the two then running at different speeds makes this task just about impossible."

Just do the speed-up or slow-down event by event after the multi-camera editing. It's not impossible, but probably not worth the effort.
mdindestin wrote on 8/5/2015, 4:45 PM
You have some work cut out for you just in matching shots with the different picture styles and cams.

How does the Nikon 810 full frame footage stack up against the GH4?

Wouldn't it all look gorgeous in a 1080p project? It's already going to choke Grandma's computer..
Chienworks wrote on 8/5/2015, 5:04 PM
"Just do the speed-up or slow-down event by event after the multi-camera editing."

If you do that then the end point will no longer be the same and you'll lose the sync going to the next event.

Even if you shrink/stretch the event to keep the end point the same, you've also altered the pitch or the speed of the audio, or both, and will get an audio discontinuity at the edit points.