the best way to convert hd to sd?

Hi,

just wondering what the best way is to convert hd to sd? 16:9 to 4:3 without losing too much quality?

thanks in advance.

Lose quality? The only thing you'll be doing is cutting off the sides. The quality will be great as your working with a lot more image data.

I have to ask though. Why on earth do you want 4:3?

losing quality part was about converting it to sd.

4:3 is for the broadcast service where i live in.

any suggestions for the best way to convert from hd to sd?

I recently had to give my clients 4:3 but high res for their web placement.
here are pic of my settings. a little tricky, but worked great!
i saved my custom setting in compressor so anytime i wanted to output a file from FCPx. i would just "share" using the pre-saved custom compressor setting, and check render in the background.

thank you very much ptrush.i apprecite it.

Well if it was me I'd just create a SD Preoject and then edit the HD footage into it. This way you can Pan and Scan your shots to make them fit the format.

you could do that but after you drop those HD clips into the storyline, you'll never get that resolution back... crisis mentioned not wanting to loose too much quality.
but yeah, if you find that SD is enough resolution for your client you can select all of your clips in the storyline and change spacial conform to none allowing room to move your clips around in the viewer.

Never get that resolution back? I'm sorry I guess I'm not understanding the process here. I thought he was editing a 4:3 project from scratch. Not converting a HD project to 4:3.

yep, I'm pretty sure that if you start in an SD project, drop your clips in, then decide later to reconform to HD, I'm pretty sure the clips will still be SD.

yep, I'm pretty sure that if you start in an SD project, drop your clips in, then decide later to reconform to HD, I'm pretty sure the clips will still be SD.

If you have HD clips in an event and add them to SD project, then change the project settings to HD it's still referencing the same clips. Losing the original clips quality isn't a problem.

What will be a problem is if putting HD clips in an SD 4:3 project with Pan and Scan, then changing the setting to an HD version, the Pan and Scan is still going to be there with black bars showing up all over the place.

It could all be reset easy enough but I'd edit in an HD project, duplicate it, change the settings of the duplicate to create a 4:3 SD version with Pan & Scan and have both from the offset.