Multiclip HDV and DV for SD output workflow ?

Any ideas are appreciated.

I have a new Sony Z7U but I also have my old workhorses, the VX2100 and VX2000. I prefer to do multi camera editing.

My output is still a standard DVD (sometimes 4x3, sometimes widescreen).

For multi camera editing, the frame sizes have to match. I chose to 'uprez' the footage from the old cameras since that would allow me to 'zoom and pan' within the HDV footage.

However, if I set my sequence to a standard DVD (4x3), the HDV multiclip comes in with letter/pillar boxing for all sources. It is no issue to scale the HDV clips but the DV clip quality suffers. I assume this is because I am scaling it yet again.

It seems to me that there should be a workflow that only scales the video once, but I haven't figured it out. Any ideas?

I read the 4x3 and 16x9 article and thought it was great. I can get the sizes to match without a problem but the quality of the 'uprezzed' SD seems to suffer even though the final output is SD. I'm guessing that there has to be a smarter workflow than my approach. I uprezzed the SD to HDV so that I could do multi camera editing. I can then zoom/pan on the HDV video angles and due to the original higher resolution, the SD output looks great. However my original SD clips seem to suffer in the process.

Thanks for the lead on the software.

I can't decide if I'm pleased or not pleased with your answer. On the one hand, at least I haven't been doing anything outrageously stupid. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a good way around this except by avoiding FCP multi clips.

I wonder if there is some way to 'tag' uprezzed SD sections in the edited multiclip and automatically replace them with the original SD footage? Since the sequence is SD, this would keep the original SD quality but allow me to edit with multclips.

I suppose I should also consider trying to find some way to sneak another HDV camera purchase past my wife. That has its pluses and minuses too. Sigh, always these pesky trade-offs ...

I thought of a 2 step approach that probably will work better from a quality perspective. Edit the HDV footage on it's own in an SD timeline. Do the best you can in terms of zooming, panning, cropping to get the best you can in SD. Then export this sequence as SD footage. Make a new timeline and import this edited SD footage as well as the SD footage from the other cameras. Now put them into multiclips in FCP. This avoids the upres/then downres of the SD footage but you have to do the editing in 2 steps.