40 HDV and Multi-Camera Editing, Part I

#40 HDV and Multi-Camera Editing, Part I

One of the joys of shooting in HDV for SD delivery is the ability to pan and zoom around the HDV clip with little or no loss in quality. When editing HDV outside of the Multi-Camera environment, Premiere Pro's motion tools make this a snap. However, when you use the Multi-Camera tool, you lose some flexibility.

Which Preset Should You Use?

Which preset should you use when producing a Multi-Camera project with HDV video? As discussed more fully in #1, you should always use the preset that matches your target output, which for most producers is 16:9 SD resolution video.

In essence, when you drag your synch sequence into the edit sequence, you're dragging over a 720x480 frame, not the original 1440x1080 frame. If you want to zoom in to the image while editing in the edit sequence, Premiere Pro doesn't go back to the original HDV video for additional detail; it zooms in to the 720x480 image. This can result in pixelation and suboptimal quality.

If you zoom in to your HDV video in the synch sequence and then try to pan across the image, you'll see a black strip in the video frame like that shown in Figure 40, even if the HDV video has image detail in the original HDV frame.

Figure 40. Premiere Pro truncates the HDV frame to a 720x480 resolution when you nest the synch sequence in an SD edit sequence. Even though there's additional detail on the left in the original HDV frame, you can't access it in the edit sequence; instead you'll see the black bar on the left.

If pan and zoom is critical to your project, #41 describes a procedure that lets you work around this issue, and it works perfectly for occasional adjustments in a project. However, if you're planning to pan and zoom around your HDV footage extensively, you may want to consider foregoing Premiere Pro's Multi-Camera tool and performing the task manually.