The Canon S3 IS shoots movies at 640x480 resolution, 30fps, so it is a contender for double duty as a video camera. My only problem up until now has been editing. But recently I figured out how to do it and get a HD 16:9 aspect ratio movie into iDVD.

I use Final Cut Express HD 3.0, but FCE has restrictions on the formats it will edit and I cannot just dial in the camera resolution. I normally shoot using anamorphic on a standard definition video camera, so the resolution of the frames is 720x480 but with a scale factor applied to stretch the horizontal. I looked briefly at converting my S3 footage to DV and dealing with all the anamorphic confusion, but that seemed like a lot of work. And anyway I really wanted to avoid DV and use HD if at all possible.

Here is how I did it.

Create a New Final Cut Express Project

Set the project up to be HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 720p30 by pressing control-Q and selecting from the pop-up:

This gives a resolution of 1280x720 progressive (no interlacing). It is double the width of the S3 video, and less than double the height, so forcing the S3 video into this format will chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of each frame:

In S3 video coordinates it will look like this:

There is only enough information for 640x360, so that will make for a good Quicktime export size.

Import S3 Video

I do this simply by dragging and dropping the video into the browser, but File > Import > Fiiles (command I) will work too. The raw AVI files are recognized with no problem. Internally they are motion JPEG -- just a sequence of JPEG-compressed images.

Create a new HD Sequence

I control-click in the browser and create a new sequence. This is an important step, because the sequence that was there already (Sequence1 normally) is in the previous format, the format that was set before I changed to 720p:

See that Anamorphic flag by Sequence1? My previous project was anamorphic HD. Right-click on a sequence and select Item Properties to check how it is set up. So I delete Sequence1, rename Sequence2 to Blog, and double click it to create a timeline window for it.

Double The Size of the Clips

Naively inserting the clips into this new sequence gives a display like the one below. The viewer (100%) on the left shows the original clip, while the timeline (66%) on the right shows a small image against black:

That's because on the right the 640x480 image is centered on a 1280x720 frame. So I must double its size. I will do this before adding it to the sequence. So I remove the clip from the sequence and double click on the clip in the browser, click on the Motion tab top left, and change the scale to 200 by typing in the box.

Now clicking on the video tab and reinserting my clip in the sequence gives me this:

Now I am filling the HD frame and automatically cropping. The advantage of scaling the original clip as I decided to do is that I never have to do it again, however many times I use that clip. The disadvantage is that I can no longer see the whole original frame in the viewer (see on the left). The alternative is to scale the clips after they are inserted into the sequence.

The red line above the timeline tells me that I need to render that part of the sequence. That is a consequence of using an HD format: all media is converted to the Apple Intermediate format. Once rendered I can play it full speed.

Make A Movie

Now all I need to do is to edit my movie as I normally would. In addition, because I have extra material above and below the final frame I can use the motion key framing to move the frame up and down if I need to adjust what is displayed in the available space.

To export to iDVD, nothing special is needed. Just use File > Export > Quicktime Movie and that will create a file that iDVD can import. It is quick too if you deselect Make Self-Contained Movie because it can just reference the Apple Intermediate movie. If I open that with Quicktime I see that it is 1280x720 as expected. Also it is much bigger than what I started with, since the material was scaled up by a factor of 2 and results in about 4 times the file size. This is the one disadvantage with this method. iDVD will squish the frames down to standard widescreen automatically and recognize it as 16:9.

To export to Quicktime, again nothing special is needed. 640x360 or smaller is the recommended size for the aspect ratio.

Alternative Methods

I don't have Final Cut Pro, but I would expect it to handle this in a more standard fashion. And since I have not upgraded to Final Cut Express 3.5 I cannot say how this would work in that. Once I get and Intel CPU I will upgrade and my workflow may change.

Tags: Canon, S3, Movies, Final Cut, Quicktime