So if you zoom into the HDV file during editing, Premiere can’t access the extra pixels in the HDV file and has to make them up (called interpolation) so the video looks blurry, just as it would if you tried to zoom into a DV file. It’s almost as if Premiere Pro converted the HDV file to DV, though it doesn’t physically create the DV files. Once you drag the multicam sequence into another sequence for editing, you can’t access the original HDV files. Long story short, I discovered that if you use an SD output preset (usually 16:9 720×480) for your project, as I was doing, when Premiere Pro creates the multicam sequence, it locks all videos in the multicam sequence at that resolution. I saw a black bar instead, as if the pixels simply weren’t there.

The real kicker was that if I panned around the image, I couldn’t access parts of the frame that I knew were in the original HDV image. With multicam, however, the image appeared much blurrier when zooming in. When editing in Premiere Pro without multicam, this worked well, meaning I could pan and zoom around the image without distortion.

It’s just like zooming into an ultra-high resolution image in an image-editing program so long as you’re still accessing original pixels, the image doesn’t get grainy or pixelated.

As you probably know, one of the benefits of shooting in HDV mode for SD output is the ability to pan and zoom within the higher resolution frame and not lose quality. When panning and zooming inside a clip in the multicam sequence, quality wasn’t what I expected. Recently, however, working with some multicamera projects, I started to notice some anomalies. I’ve produced a number of HDV-source projects in Premiere Pro, with generally good results.

Premiere pro multicam editing