- Hey guys, my name is Matt Johnson
and today I want to share with you how I edit footage
that is a mixture of resolutions using Adobe Premiere Pro.
So if you have some footage that is 4K
and some footage that is 1080,
or any other resolution for that matter,
and you want it all to be in one video
that is one cohesive resolution throughout,
I'm gonna show you how to to do that now.
Incidentally, I'm making this tutorial
because I've had a lot of viewers comment asking me
how to handle editing footage that is multiple resolutions.
I'm sure there are a lot of you out there
that already know how to do this though.
But if you just getting started in Adobe Premiere
and you are wondering how to handle this
or maybe you've been editing for awhile
and you haven't run into needing
to handle multiple resolution clips,
I hope this video helps you out.
Let's jump right into Adobe Premiere.
Alright, welcome to Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018.
I'm going to up here to help, about,
and you're going to see I'm on version 12.0.0.
If you're on an earlier version
things may be very slightly different.
But do not worry, I'm going to explain how to do things
and it should not be an issue.
Now, I'm going to go over here to the project window
and as you can see,
I have two different video clips that I have imported.
One of them is 3840 x 2160, which is 4K
and the other one is 1920 x 1080, which is 1080p.
And this is the point in the video where you need to decide
if you want to export in 4K or in 1080p.
The way that I do it is that I look at all my video clips
and I usually shoot more 4K than 1080p,
so I want to upscale all my 1080p clips to 4K.
For you though, if you shoot a lot of 1080p,
maybe you've got a lot slow motion at 60 frames per second,
your camera can't do 4K60
and you only have a bit of 4K footage,
in your case you may then want to
downscale your 4K footage from 4K to 1080p.
If you upscale your 1080p footage to 4K,
it is not gonna look as sharp as your 4K footage
but once you render it and upload it to YouTube,
the compression, it's not gonna make a huge difference.
Likewise, if you have your 4K footage
and you downscale it to 1080p,
it is going to look sharper than you 1080p footage.
But, like I said, it's not gonna be a huge difference.
So it is up to you if you want
to downscale or upscale your resolution
but at this point, you do need to make a decision.
Don't worry though,
regardless of whether you want to downscale or upscale,
I'm gonna show you what happens
whenever you choose either one.
Because I shoot more in 4K than 1080p,
I'm going to show you how to upscale
your 1080p footage on the timeline first.
So let's go up here to file, new, sequence,
and that is gonna open up the new sequence dialogue box,
which is where we tell Premiere
the resolution and the frame rate of the video
that we want to be editing and exporting.
In this case, because it is a 4K video clip at 3840 by 2160,
we're actually going to go down here
and select the RED preset,
even though we did not shoot this on a RED camera,
we're gonna select this preset because it has
the frame rate and resolution that we are looking for.
We're gonna go down to HD 4K
and we're going to select 4K HD 16x9 23.976,
which as you can see over here is 3840 by 2160
at 23.976 frames per second,
which matches up with our video clip.
Do not think you only need to use this
if you are using a RED camera,
I'm using a Sony a7S II with this video, it does not matter,
what matters is that the frame rate and resolution
match up with your video clips.
So, now that we have that selected
let's go down here to sequence name
and we're gonna name this multiple resolutions,
yeah that sounds good, press OK.
That is gonna create a new video timeline
and we are almost ready to begin adding our video clips.
But before we do that
we have one very critical settings change
that we need to make.
What we need to do here is go up to edit,
preferences,
media,
and that is going to open up the preferences dialogue box
for Premiere under the media section.
And what we need to pay attention to
is this little section here that says default media scaling.
You want to make sure that your default media scaling
is set to, set to frame size, so make sure that's selected
and let's hit OK.
Do not worry, I'll explain why we had to change
those settings in just a second
but for now let's go up here and start dragging
our clips down to the timeline.
So, I'm gonna go over here to the 3840 by 2160 clip,
I'm gonna click, and drag it down onto the timeline.
And that's a good looking clip,
it's nice and sharp, that looks great.
But it is quite long, I don't need a five minute long clip,
so let's drag that way down and make it a lot shorter.
So there is our 4K clip.
Next, I'm gonna go up here to the project window
and I'm going to select my 1920 by 1080p clip,
and I'm gonna drag it down here to the timeline as well.
And if I scrub over it you're gonna see,
hey, this looks really good too,
and it is properly scaled in the window
just like the 4K clip.
So even though these clips are different resolutions
because we changed that setting,
both of these clips are now scaled properly.
That said though, what if we did not change
that setting in the preferences first?
Well, let's see what would happen.
We'll go up here to edit, preferences, media again,
and I'm going to turn the default media scaling to none
and hit OK. And then if I delete
this 1920 by 1080p clip from the timeline,
go back up here and drag it down agan,
Oh man! That is a lot of black bars`around this video clip.
Because this is what a 1080p video
looks like in a 4K timeline.
It is not being scaled so it is actually quite small.
So we do not want this.
We want our video clip to be filling the entire frame.
Now, what happens if you have a clip
and you do not remember to go in and change that setting?
What can you do?
Well, I have good news for you.
You can actually right-click on any clip on your timeline
that is not properly scaled,
you can right-click on it
and you can go up to set to frame size,
click that and now it is filling the full frame.
And by right-clicking on this clip
and selecting set to frame size,
you are doing the exact same thing that we did
whenever we went up to edit, media,
and changed the setting in there as well.
This way you have to do it individually though,
I find that the preferences are easier.
While I've been going through all these settings,
you may have actually noticed that
there is a third option for scaling.
So if I go up here to edit, preferences, media,
and I go to default media scaling,
you'll see there is a third drop-down option:
scale to frame size.
Do we want to use that? Is scale to frame size good?
No. It's not good in my opinion.
Because if you set your clips to scale to frame size,
then you're not going to be able to actually tell
which of your clips are 1080 and which of your clips are 4K
without needing to go into the project window
and dig through to double check.
That's a pain,
that's why I recommend using set to frame size.
We're gonna go in ahead
and cancel out of the preferences window
without making any changes,
and the last thing I'm going to show you
is how to adjust the scaling
of your clips individually if you need to.
So let's go up here to effect controls.
Under effect controls you have motion, position and scale.
Scale is what we want to pay attention to
because that effects the size and scaling
of our video clip in the timeline.
So, because I have the 1920 by 1080 video clips selected,
it is currently set to a scale of 200
so that it will fill the frame properly.
Let's set it back to 200 so I don't break it.
Next let's look down here at our 4K video clip,
and as you can see, it is currently set to a scale of 100.
So, if you want to manipulate your scaling
without having Premiere do it for you,
you can definitely do that by going
and adjusting the scaling individually.
So, if I want it to be super zoomed in on Noah's nose,
I can do that. That's cool, but I'm not gonna do that,
let's just bring that back to 100 and that looks good.
Now, let's talk about downscaling your video clips
from 4K to 1080p for editing and exporting.
So, we're going to go up here to file, new sequence,
and as you can see we have a sequence option preset
that's already selected here, which is great.
Under digital SLR, we want to select 1080p, DSLR 1080p24,
which is gonna match the 1080p,
24 frames per second resolution and frame rate
that I want for this video.
And we're gonna call this multiple resolutions
1080p, that way its slightly different. Hit OK.
And the great news is because
we already changed those settings up here
in edit, preferences, media,
and we changed it from default media scaling
to set to frame size,
we do not need to do that again
and our footage is just gonna work.
So, let's go up here and we're going to select
our 1920 by 1080 video clip
and we're gonna drag it onto the timeline
and oh my gosh, look at that: right resolution,
that looks really, really great.
But let's look at our 4K video clip at 3840 by 2160 up here
and drag that down as well, drag over it.
Ta-da! Look its properly scaled and it looks good.
And if I select the clip
and I go up here to the effect controls,
you're gonna see that it has auto-applied the scale to be 50
because a hundred is gonna be that
and that's too much, so we want that back down there at 50
and hey, that's looking pretty great.
So now, all of our resolutions are matching up,
regardless of whether we shot in 4K
or whether we shot in 1080p,
if we are editing on a timeline,
and we have those settings selected,
you don't need to worry about anything else
because your footage is going to match up and look great
regardless of the resolution.
That's it. Thank you so much for watching.
I hope this video's been helpful to you
and given you some great insight
into how to edit videos that are mixed resolutions.
I have another video that I'm going
to be coming out with very quickly that's going to cover
how to edit video that is mixed frame rates,
so if you have one camera that's shooting
at 24 frames per second,
another camera that's shooting at 60 frames per second,
then you switch your first camera to 30 frames per second,
and you have all these mixed frame rates on your timeline,
I'm gonna show you how I edit that properly
and make it look really good.
That video will be out very soon,
I will link to it up here in the corner
and down in the description whenever it is out.
As always, if you have any questions or comments
please feel free to leave one below
or get in touch with me through my website: whoismatt.com.
It is also a enormous help to me
if you would consider liking this video and subscribing
if you'd like to see more video like it in the future.
I also have a ton of links
down in the description of this video.
Links to my Instagram, links to my Facebook,
links to one-on-one consulting with me,
links to my newsletter that I send out once per month,
links to my wedding film production company,
all of that is linked down in the description of this video.
Thank you so much for watching and have a great day.