rendering w FCP and using mpeg streamclip

I have to edit a musical shot using 5 cameras. Three of the cameras have recorded footage in sd (All are 720 x 480, but one was wide-screen), the fourth camera recorded in hd 1440 x 1080, and the 5th camera recorded in sd 640 x 480. They have the same rate 29.97. The performance is about an hour in length.

After transferring the footage into FCP it took about 4 hours to render everything.

Should I match the sequence settings to that of the 3 cameras?

I am interested in knowing if I can get around needing to re-render by concerting the remaining camera files using mpeg streamclip?

Any additional info will be helpful.

Thanks

That's a real mess there - 3 different resolutions, 2 different aspect ratios - have you decided what resolution you'll use? I'm guessing that you're probably going to use 720x480? The biggest issue setting is going to be that wide screen camera - that one camera you may have to create a specific 720x480 sequence that is not set for 16:9/anamorphic, and scale up the the video so it's not letterbox and create a form of pan and scan to keep what you want viewed (assuming the camera was controlled and potentially moved during the performance) in the viewable region for 720x480 then export that sequence and use the new version of your clip in your project.

You could use mpegstreamclip to convert the other footages to 720x480 (the 1440x1080 and 640x480) and it may speed up the overall process for you - as I mentioned before, the only clip that could present a problem will be that widescreen clip. But if you do, just make sure you use the FCP codec that will be used for the sequence otherwise you'll be wasting your time.

I don't know if you've also considered this - but you probably have an additional issue to take care of - color balance - since the different camera manufacturers (and different cameras from a given manufacturer) all will render color differently, switching from camera to camera during the performance could be a very jarring situation unless you do something to make the color balance between the cameras close enough to trick the eye (I used to have to deal with this all the time when we had 2 panasonic and 1 sony camera to record graduations with - the 2 panasonics looked the same for all intents and purposes, but the sony video looked very different and had to be modified so it didn't look so bad when cutting between them)

Use Compressor to make them all Pro Res, same frame size, same frame rate, Compressor does a wonderful job at this. The 640x480 footage is going to get blow up a lot and look really bad, though, unless you use Padding in Compressor to keep it in it's original size, but padded with black to fill in the rest of the HD frame size.

Honestly tho, considering he only has 1 camera in HD (and appearing it to not be 16:9), I think overall he'd probably do better to downscale the HD footage to SD then to upscale all of the SD footage to HD..