I'm just an amateur but I often refer to this forum for tips and advice from the experts. A big thanks is due to all of you who participate here. I frequently
shoot music and performance events using two little point-and-shoot cameras (Panasonic ZS-19) on tripods set for stationary wide and mid shots at
1920x1080 and a handheld Panasonic TM-300 HD camcorder which I roam around with for close ups, zooms, etc. It's funny but the little P&S
cameras often look as good or better than the 3-chip does. The only drawback with them is having to restart their recording of video before the 29
minute time limit is up. Thank you, World Trade Commission! I record audio off the mixing board with a littleTascam DR-08. Had a Zoom H4 a few
years ago, what a piece of junk. Wouldn't hold sync for more than a few minutes because of a crappy timebase. I manually sync or use PluralEyes
(great program!) to sync everything to the master audio. My intended final output is always widescreen DVD so I convert all of my native video
(AVCHD) in AME CS6 to NTSC Widescreen DV avi files before using them in PP CS6. I've got a hot computer but I just do it that way so editing
goes even faster. Of course I've still got all of my originals if I ever needed to do a BluRay or something in the future.
After all that, here is my question: There are times I would like to crop something out of one of the little camera shots to get it better centered or
maybe a little closer up. I've been opening a new project, placing the original on the timeline, setting in and out points for what I want, applying
Transform - Crop to the clip, adjusting the cropping to what looks about like what I want in 16x9, checking zoom to fill, and exporting media to a
widescreen DV avi, and then I've got a new camera angle I can insert into another track. I know I can't crop way into the HD image without losing
detail but if I keep it to about 1/3 or less of the original shouldn't I be getting almost full 720x480 on the output? Is there a way I can constrain my crop
to 16x9 to keep it in proportion after the zoom other than just eyeballing it? And finally, is this even the way to go about doing something like this or
does somebody have any other methods that I don't know about?
Thanks. Mike