Which frame rate to shoot for which moment, why dropping 60fps onto a 24fps timeline looks stuttery, and the four-click Interpret Footage trick that makes an entire project match.
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You’ve got some 4K footage and some 1080p footage and you need it all to be one video at one resolution. Here’s how I handle that in Premiere Pro, and honestly the whole thing comes down to one checkbox that nobody tells you about.
I’m making this because a lot of you have asked. Plenty of people already know this one, but if you’re new to Premiere, or you’ve been editing a while and just never happened to hit mixed resolutions, this should sort you out.
Before you touch anything you have to decide whether you’re exporting in 4K or in 1080p, because everything downstream follows from that.
The way I decide is simple: I look at what I’ve actually got. I shoot far more 4K than 1080p, so I upscale the 1080p up to 4K. If you’re the other way around, maybe you shoot a lot of 60fps slow motion because your camera can’t do 4K60, and you’ve only got a bit of 4K, then downscale the 4K to 1080p instead.
Yes, upscaled 1080p won’t be as sharp as your real 4K, and downscaled 4K will look sharper than your real 1080p. But once it’s rendered and YouTube has had its way with it, the difference is genuinely not a big deal. Pick whichever direction means less of your footage getting messed with and move on.
File, New, Sequence. This is where you tell Premiere the resolution and frame rate you want to edit and export at.
For a 3840 by 2160 timeline at 23.976, go down to the RED presets, then HD 4K, then 4K HD 16×9 23.976. And I know what you’re about to say. No, you do not need a RED camera. I shot this on a Sony a7S II. The preset does not care what camera you own, it only sets a resolution and a frame rate, and that one happens to have exactly the pair I want.
Before you drag a single clip down, go to Edit, Preferences, Media.
Find Default Media Scaling and set it to Set to Frame Size. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
Now drag your 4K clip onto the timeline, nice and sharp, looks great. Then drag your 1080p clip down and scrub over it, and it fills the frame properly too. Two different resolutions, both scaled correctly, no thinking required.
So what happens if you don’t change it? Set it back to None, delete the 1080p clip, drag it in again, and there it is.
Black bars everywhere, because that is exactly what a 1080p video is in a 4K timeline: a quarter of the frame, sitting there being small. Which is what you’ve been fighting whenever this has happened to you.
No problem. Right-click any clip on the timeline that isn’t scaled right, choose Set to Frame Size, and it snaps to full frame. That does exactly the same thing as the preferences change, just one clip at a time, which is why I prefer setting the preference and forgetting about it.
You’ll have noticed there’s a third option in that dropdown, and it’s worth explaining why I skip it.
Whenever you use Scale to Frame Size, you lose the ability to tell at a glance which clips are 1080 and which are 4K, because the scale value no longer tells you anything. You have to go dig around in the project window to check. That’s a pain, and it’s the entire reason I use Set to Frame Size instead. Set leaves the scale value visible and honest.
Select a clip and open Effect Controls, where you’ll find Motion, then Position and Scale.
With the 1080p clip selected in a 4K timeline, Scale reads 200, which is what’s filling the frame. The 4K clip in the same timeline reads 100. So if you ever want to override Premiere and push in on something yourself, that’s the number you touch. You can absolutely zoom way in on somebody’s nose if you want to. I’m not going to, but you can.
File, New, Sequence again, and this time go to Digital SLR, then 1080p, then DSLR 1080p24.
Here’s the good news: you already changed the preference, so it applies here too and you don’t have to do anything else. Drag the 1080p clip in and it’s native. Drag the 4K clip in and it scales down, and if you check Effect Controls you’ll see Premiere set it to 50 automatically, which is exactly right.
And that’s genuinely all of it. With that one preference set, your footage matches up and looks right no matter what resolution you shot it at, and you stop thinking about this forever.
If your problem is mixed frame rates rather than mixed resolutions, that’s a different fix and I made a separate guide: how to film and edit mixed frame rate video in Premiere Pro.
Don’t have Premiere? There’s a free trial. My color presets are at whoismatt.com/luts, my full edit process is in Wedding Film Framework, and there are a few thousand of us in the Learn Wedding Filmmaking Facebook group.
Four techniques I actually use with a sixteen dollar prism in my wedding films, plus the lens, focus and handheld settings that make it work.
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When she was 12, a young girl named Tory started writing love letters to her future husband.
She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know when she’d meet him. She just had faith that one day they’d be married. So she wrote to him often, sometimes several times in a day, and she always signed off the same way: “XOXO, your wife.”
A young man named Henry walked into the gym where she worked. He was insightful, he was kind, and he insisted on calling her “Victoria,” a name befitting a princess.
More than any of that, though, Henry was persistent.
At which point you’re thinking, this is him. This is the guy she’s been writing to all these years. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But nothing is ever that simple.
Victoria and Henry started a friendship, which eventually became a first date. On that date Henry asked her, “Do you see a future with us?”
Victoria immediately and directly answered: “No, I do not see a future with us.”
But as I said, Henry was persistent. That first date led to another one. And somewhere in there, Victoria’s letters and her prayers started being directed at a specific person.
This film is the culmination of both halves of that: Victoria’s letters and Henry’s persistence. A wedding to a husband long dreamt for, and to a wife who was persistently pursued.
Victoria and her dad have always been close, and he knew that growing up she’d written all those letters to her future husband.
What he did not know is that she had written something for him, too. A song. She wrote it, she recorded it, and she played it while the two of them danced together at her reception.
That’s the kind of thing you cannot plan for as a filmmaker and cannot possibly ask a couple to recreate. All you can do is know it’s coming, be in the right place with the right lens before the music starts, and then stay out of the way. Everything else about a wedding day is repeatable. That is not.
That’s how Henry put it, and I would agree. Partially because it genuinely was wonderful, and partially because Henry is Rachel’s cousin. We are thrilled to be related to such an incredible couple with a story like this one.
This is a full film rather than a highlight, and it earns the length. A four-minute highlight is built out of the best images of a day. A film this long is built out of the best talking, and that only works whenever the couple has given you enough of it: letters read out loud, vows in their own words, toasts from people who actually know them.
Victoria and Henry had all of that plus a story that had been building since she was twelve, so the film could take its time and let the story tell itself instead of cutting hard to keep the energy up.
📷 My favorite wedding filmmaking gear, and my Sony a7S II wedding setup specifically. Color graded with my LUTs.
Rachel and I would love to film it. 🎥 Please get in touch.
And if you’re the one behind the camera, 🎬 my wedding film editing course is where I teach how a film like this gets built.
Three days filming a Colorado wedding, including picking the ceremony site ourselves, moving the prep room for better light, and the full ceremony coverage plan.
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Every part in a 000 4K editing PC built for Premiere Pro, why each one was chosen, and where to spend less without hurting performance.
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