1920x1080 mp4 to 720x480 dv

[sneaux]

My friend made a movie with a hard drive camera in HD. I want to edit in final cut so I have to convert. I can convert to DV using quicktime pro but the files come into final cut letterboxed. Quicktime is preserving the 16:9 ratio but final cut forces it to be 4:3 letterboxed. How do I get final cut to preserve 16:9?

Thanks

jacob

[minidv2dvd]

what's the final output format going to be? if it's HD then rendering to SD and back is going to really lower the quality. it's already in a highly compressed long gop format. i'd edit it in it's original format and only re-render it once to it's final format.

if you can't do it that way, i'd render to a lossless intermediate format and then do the edits. DVavi isn't lossless.

[sneaux]

The final output will be a dvd. I can't edit it in its original format because final cut won't read mp4. There are a lot of special effects I want to put in this video and doubt I will be able to do what I want in a program designed to to edit mp4. I really want to edit in standard DV. Is DVavi the same as standard DV?

[minidv2dvd]

DVavi is the type of DV used on a PC, mac's use DV without the avi wrapper. same content in a different format. DVavi has a widescreen 720x480 option, i don't know if mac's DV does.

isn't there an apple intermediate codec final cut could use that might be less costly in terms of quality loss? to keep it at 1920x1080 until the final render to dvd mpeg-2.

if not maybe render to a lossless codec like huffyuv or lagarith. you might need to render to 864x480 to keep the widescreen a/r.