There is no setting, but this will occur as PD uses the source video during production, so yes, one could zoom into just one quadrant of the 4k video in the timeline and during a 1080 production get that true 1080 resolution in that quadrant.

The timeline display resolution can be set but is rather artificial and intended to only reduce editing strain during timeline playback.

Jeff

Quote There is no setting, but this will occur as PD uses the source video during production, so yes, one could zoom into just one quadrant of the 4k video in the timeline and during a 1080 production get that true 1080 resolution in that quadrant.

The timeline display resolution can be set but is rather artificial and intended to only reduce editing strain during timeline playback.

Jeff

Thanks for your reply. Just so I got this clear are you saying that the 4k of extra pixels are used at production time so If I zoomed in 200% which in the editing it would have pushed the 4k resolution beyond its actual pixel scale. At render time PD scales down the 4k to 1080p while keep available pixels from the 4k source file rather than not looking at the zoom footage as 100% beyond its true scale and baking it into a 1080p version of it?

Kind of confusing as I'm used to setting the project to 1080p, scale down the 4k then as I edit I get to view the actual output quality in the editor. In theory I can zoom to 200% using the 4 x 4 grid without loosing pixel data when exporting it at 1080p.

Dan

PD doesn't care what resolution your timeline content is in when it comes to producing. If you have 4K content and you want to produce to 1080p, PD automatically downscales it with no user thought or action required. Same with upscaling HD to 4K. That's all done by the rendering engine and you don't have to worry about what happens to individual pixels.

In your case, you want to manually crop an HD-sized section of a 4K clip and then produce that as a 1-1, pixel-for-pixel HD clip.

That means you'll want to use the PiP Designer or the Crop/Zoom/Pan tool to define your source content (which places all the unused original pixels off-screen), then produce it as 1080p. It's pretty straightforward if you look at it from the way PD is designed.

Quote Thanks for your reply. Just so I got this clear are you saying that the 4k of extra pixels are used at production time so If I zoomed in 200% which in the editing it would have pushed the 4k resolution beyond its actual pixel scale. At render time PD scales down the 4k to 1080p while keep available pixels from the 4k source file rather than not looking at the zoom footage as 100% beyond its true scale and baking it into a 1080p version of it?

Correct

Quote Kind of confusing as I'm used to setting the project to 1080p, scale down the 4k then as I edit I get to view the actual output quality in the editor. In theory I can zoom to 200% using the 4 x 4 grid without loosing pixel data when exporting it at 1080p.

Not a single piece of a 4 x 4 grid, just a single piece of 2 x 2 grid, hence why I wrote a quadrant.

Jeff

Thanks for all your replies. My intention is to produce 1080p footage where here and there I will zoom in and back out, so I wont be cropping but pan and zooming. In my case using 4k source as to not look quality when zooming in which of course I was when I used 1080p source files for 1080p output.

Thanks,

Dan

Depending on your subject, you may find that producing to 4K with occasional zooms will work better.

When I was recording my daughter's lacrosse games, I ended up producing the entire video to 4K because the quality was much better and PD handled the zoomed shots nicely.

Here's an example of a highlight reel where full screen 4K transistions to edited zooms and back, yet the shifts and optical vs. edited zooms are imperceptable:



(The short section at 2:03 that is clearly lower quality is actually from a wide field, co-mounted HD camera I used to keep the action in view if I messed up when tracking the ball. I was able to stitch together coherent videos several times over the season that would have otherwise been lost)

In other cases, shooting in 4K with the expectation that you can crop/zoom/pan an HD section like you've stated will also give you good results. Here's a video I took yesterday of a Falcon 9 launch:



Due to problems with my tripod not being able to track the rocket when it was nearly overhead, I had to make liberal use of the C/Z/P and keyframe tools just to keep the rocket in the frame, and since I also had to zoom in to do that it made sense to keep the entire video as full quality HD.

Here's what the tracking keyframes for the first sce3ne look like in the PiP Designer: