Mixing Red and Smaller footage

[Piers McGrail]

Say I'm working with both 2k Red files and 1080p/720p on the same timeline. Does it make more sense to scale up the smaller footage, or scale down the Red footage?

And is the best way to do this just by literally increasing/decreasing the scale in the 'motion' tab? I have done this before and it seems to work fine...

Just wondering if there are more established routes for this process?

Thanks,

Piers

 

[Martin Weiss]

What is the final format?

 

[Frank Mirbach]

Depend on final format. We had to upscale footage for use in a 1080p project and it worked fine.

Frank

 

[Piers McGrail]

Thanks, it was more of a general question- I don't have a specific project in mind. That makes a lot of sense, just scale all footage to the final format.

And is 'scale' parameter in the motion tab the best way to do this? Is there any quality advantage to use, say, the geometry room in Color?

 

[hans de vries]

There are a couple of apps that claim to do a better job than just upscaling in fcp; I think the pana dvx100 now even comes with an upscaling program. There's Digital Anarchy's Resizer 2. I've tried mixing dvx footage with red footage and only found it acceptable in the cases where it was okay that the image was really different, for instances when several layers were fading in and out through each other, so the whole image wasn't standard anyway. But I think your material was all hd, right, so that should be easier?

 

[Piers McGrail]

Again, it's more of an 'in general' question, but if I was to pick a recent example, there is one job that will require mixing 1080i hdv footage with Red. Obviously the footage won't match, but it's a documentary (interviews on hdv, pick ups on Red) so it should be pretty acceptable to mix, I think.

I reckon they'll be looking to finish at 1080p, so in this case would it be better to scale down the Red footage to match?