Hi all,

Looking for any recommendations on producing a short film in vertical (1080x1920) format. Shooting on a BMCC, probably on its side, so I'm thinking either just turn the client monitor so it's vertical and edit that way, in a regular 'horizontal' format, then just flip 90 degrees when compressing in sorenson.

Or, create a 1080x1920 custom project and edit that way - not sure on the pitfalls of this though, especially if the camera is shooting on its side anyway...

Anyone done this recently?

I've recently done exactly that. Shot with an fs7 both normal, then flipped 90 degrees. Both edits I did in avid 1920x1080.

when it came to the portrait version I dropped a quick rotate effect on the top layer just to quickly look at what was happening. Then when the client was in, we flipped the output monitor 90 degrees.

in terms of output we produced two 1920x1080 videoes as the client was rotating the monitors on their exhibitor stand, so I'd ask how your portrait version is being played.

whenever I've played with custom sizes in avid it never treats the footage how you'd expect. Not like premiere or after effects does.

Hi Ant,

Thanks for your reply - this was to be a simple 1080x1920 portrait output, shot with a BMCC on it's side. However, the shoot specs have changed at the last moment. Now, it is being shot on an Fs7 in 4k, regular 16:9 aspect ratio, but with a view to crop the centre to a 1080x1920 output.

For the edit, I am now thinking ingest in 4k, edit as normal, export a 4k master and crop it down to 1080x1920 in sorenson. This should be ok i think as long as the crop is always central (I hope it is being shot with this in mind, i.e. with the viewfinder masked, but it's not under my control). My concern is that during the edit different crops will be requested for different shots - for example the crop might need to move over to the left or right to get someone or something framed correctly, and this will vary between shots. Not sure how to do this in Avid. My inclination would be to go to After Effects where it will be easy to crop different areas of the shot, but not so easy to edit. So I guess I could either edit as normal and export a 4k master, then take it into after effects and crop each shot as necessary - ok as long as there aren't fades or other transitions between shots. Or, edit as normal, take a note of each shot that needs a different (i.e. non-central crop), crop/move those individually to the right framing in AE and batch import back into Avid...then export 4k 16:9 and crop to 1080x1920 in sorenson...hmm...

my initial reaction is as you say edit in 4K. I'd create an alpha'd cutout in Photoshop that has a hole off 1080x1920 and drop on say v2 or above, then edit as normal below, using image resize to "reframe" your shot left and right and dve under the cutout and dont worry the black either side, as you're cropping that after in your encode. I try a quick test first to be happy with it.

you can try and insist they use user markers in viewfinder, but then I know what can happen on shoots, best laid plans.......

Hi Ant,

Thanks for the help, it worked as far as the Avid workflow goes, however I'm having massive problems getting Sorenson to crop accurately. I have to use h.264 so am using main concept h.264 in sorenson. Whilst the crop filter says it will crop to 1080x1920, what you get is 1088x1920 (or 1072 if you try to reduce it a little. It seems the mainconcept codec just won't do 1080 width for some reason. Sorenson will crop accurately when using DNXHR, but that's no good to me.

Even if I put the accurately cropped DNXHR version back through sorenson, it still comes out as 1088 wide. I'm at a loss really.

I've tried After Effects but it messes up the colour and contrast on export, even when i try various color management spaces. I've also tried the basic h.264 codec in sorenson (not mainconcept) which crops accurately but also makes the video looked washed out and a bit pixelated (at 10,000mbps).

Sorry to impose further but I'm just looking for ideas!

Actually, scratch that. The theory, and my settings, were right - just tried it on another edit suite as a last resort, and it worked (of course). 

Always has to be something nonsensical, and the last thing you try after 6 hours of trying to compress one video...