how to deal with different resolutions in FCPX

Hi,

I am a new member in this forum.

I am working on a documentary film project and I am in the last stages of shooting. I will be doing the rough editing myself and looking for some advice related to editing.

At the moment I am working on a teaser for pitching and wondering what would be the best way to deal with different resolutions. I am using Sony FS7 and Gopro 5 and the footage comes in a number of different resolution:

Sony FS7 4K (4096 x 2160) (70% of the footage)
Sony FS7 Slow motion mode (1920x1080)
Gopro 5 4K (3840x2160) and (2704x1520) and (1920x1080)

I would be grateful if someone could advise me on what would be the best project resolution in FCPX to combine all this footage of different resolutions. For now I have set it 4096 x 2160, however, I am not sure if that is an optimal setting to accommodate other resolutions.

Your advice would be very helpful.

Thanks.
Mindaugas

Welcome Mindaugas to fcp.co

… what is your delivery resolution? => use that.

Agreed. But keep in mind any timeline larger than 1920x1080 will have some "soft" footage since two of your sources are 1080. In a perfect world, 1080 is your deliverable and you can make your project that resolution.

As the film is intended for cinema projection, I believe the resolution should be 2K 2048 × 1080 or 4K 4096 × 2160.

However, I am wondering if I am going with 4K, wouldn't the footage of other resolutions suffer too much after I upscale it, let's say from 1920x1080 to 4096x2160?

I don't have an access to test this on a real screen in a theater and on my iMac 27-inch the upscaled footage looks equally good... well, to my inexperienced eyes.

As a little addition to what has been said already: if you deliver in 1080, you can take advantage of the extra pixels in the 4K material for reframing in post.

Depends on your delivery specs of course, but if I were you, I'd go ahead and finish in 4k and not 1080p since that's the bulk of your footage. And by 4k, I mean probably UHD at 3840x2160, so you keep 16x9. You CAN do your original res, to have closer to that 1.85:1 ratio, but it'll make delivery for TV more of a pain and force you to zoom in your 1080p and UHD footage a little bit more. If this were two years ago, 1080p would be fine, but I wouldn't do that for a documentary film now.

All that said, FCPX is actually pretty good about changing resolutions of a timeline at any time. All your scaling and keyframing is based on percentages and not absolute pixels, so you wouldn't have to redo any of it.