Force SD from HD Video?

[Matt82au]

Hey everyone, I have just made the jump to Pro Tools 12 and am exploring the video engine and its little charms. Our feeds to our VO booth are currently only SD compatible.. I have found that if I load an SD video file into the Pro Tools video timeline, Pro Tools is able to conform everything too that SD ratio quite smoothly.

Is there anyway to force Pro Tools to do this without loading in an external video at the different resolution? Would save me some trouble.

Thanks!

[BScout]

Wouldn't the easiest way be to convert your video to SD aspect ratio with padding set as the option in video format? You can tell protools to display video in different aspect ratios (right-click on the picture) and it will be distorted but you can't do that through external video hardware which is what it sounds like you're using.

Honestly I'm more surprised you've been able to stick to SD ratios seeing as HD has been near the standard for quite a few years.

[Matt82au]

We do work in HD pictures always, its just that right now our lines to the VO booth run over composite connections that need an SD signal (hence, doing a hardware downconversion whilst recording), or run into an SDI box which is old and only handles SD.

I don't want to convert everything to SD as our mixing suites are all HD set up. What I would previously do would be to just down convert our vision for the VO recording, and then switch back to HD for our mix.

Now with PT12, the process has changed slightly. The video engine is actually clever enough to to the conversion for me, so long as I have an SD file in the timeline... Instead of dragging one in everytime, or keeping one in the template, it would be good to be able to dictate whatever resolution I would like to export out.

We are upgrading lines and hardware to make it HD, but for now I need a workaround and was hoping there might be a switch or tick box I am missing :)

FWIW, Pro Tools seems pretty happy handling SD ratios with the pillar box or stretch options so far also which is pretty handy.

[MIKEROPHONICS]

My booth is SD. My hardware is AJA IOXT. It does instantaneous hardware down conversion to SD as well as outputting the HD