Comments on: New article: Delivering a 16:9 project using 4:3 footage

By: John

John — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:24:19 +0000

You can have it play back letterboxed on a 4:3 screen and fullscreen on a 16:9 screen if you deliver with a anamorphic DVD.

Or I suppose, if you deliver with a 16:9 video file, and whatever you are using to play back on the 4:3 screen (like, say, quicktime player) does its own fullscreening.

You won’t lose quality with any of the above if you do it right.

By: David

David — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:23:32 +0000

Say I shot my footage in 4:3 and wanted it to play back letterboxed on a 4:3 screen and fullscreen (cropped) on a 16×9 screen. Would I be better off working in 4×3 (distorted) and setting the compression to 16×9, or is there a way I can work in Final Cut Pro 16×9 and get a 4:3 monitor to letterbox?

Basically, I want to crop my 4:3 footage to 16×9 and I can’t tell if streching it so that the canvas is filled and the top and bottom are cut off is degrading the quality.

Sorry if that was confusing, I’m very confused myself.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:21:40 +0000

Thanks the the help– your article is awesome! Take care.

By: John

John — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:19:46 +0000

Well, I just haven’t worked with this stuff for a long time, so I couldn’t offer much help myself.

By: Robin

Robin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:17:58 +0000

John,

Thanks. Ken Stone is the best. Indeed; cryptic posts by nature yield little! Apologies if my post was difficult to understand… :) Thanks again.

Robin

By: John

John — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:53:23 +0000

Robin-

I haven’t worked with this stuff for a while. Check out the Ken Stone discussions:

http://www.kenstone.net/cgi/discussions/general.cgi

Present your question there. The people there are very helpful, but make sure to ask a good question. Take some time putting your question together so that it’s easy for someone to understand your problem.

Good luck.

By: Robin

Robin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:31:40 +0000

Great site.

Working with anamorphic footage and regular 3:2 footage in dv ntsc 3:2 sequence. Burnng this to 3:2 DVD has been no problem. I have worked with scaling to make consistant widescreen effect. Now, I need to make a 16:9 DVD. Please help. This now needs to be on dvd at 16:9 going to Germany although pal was not specified in specs. the anamorphic footage is set at -33.33. Some of the dv footage was digitized as widescreen. When I export to compressor from 3:2 as a 16:9 mpeg in dvdsp the image still looks elongated. Please help. How do I work with anamorphic and 3:2 footage in one sequence and output as 16:9? I have removed the -33.33 and set it to zero, placed clips in anamorphic timeline and nothing seems to work. Thanks.

By: gerry

gerry — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:48:00 +0000

You can also just crop 4:3 vid using the crop tool. Crop to 13 off the top and 13 off the bottom

By: John

John — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:52:43 +0000

BradL-

Depending on your needs, I would probably recommend that you use anamorphic mode and do not use the lens adapter. You don’t get a whole lot of improvement in the picture quality with the lens adapter, and it makes your production and post production workflow a big pain. Also, depending on the adapter, you are probably limiting the range within which you can zoom before seeing vignetting.

You are DEFINITELY not better off shooting 4:3 and letterboxing. Anamorphic is superior in all ways.

By: BradL

BradL — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:35:14 +0000

I’m about to shoot a short using a GL2. I had planned on using a 16:9 Lens Adaptor plus using Instant HD upscaling software w/FCP 6. The final product would DVCAM DVD or HD DVD. However, would I be better off just shooting 4:3 but framing it for letterbox or what?

Now reading all this information, I’m not sure.

My plans was to enter the short in the film festival curcuit. So most of the time the DVD will be projected on a large screen.

Confused.

Thanx in Advance

By: Kaay

Kaay — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:16:28 +0000

Text is appearing very blurry on my 16:9 Plasma. 18px (Ariel Reg) text almost unreadable. I am burning my DVD in DVD Studio pro
AE 7 setting are:
COMP SIZE: 1024X576 (SQUARE PX)
RENDERING SETTING: QUICKTIME (ANIMATION) FULL RESOLUTION
Importing in DVD studio and encoding there.

DVD STUDIO ENCODING SETTING:
ASPECT RATIO: 16:9
FIELD ORDER: AUTO
MODE: TWO PASS VBR
BIT RATE: 5.5
MAX BIT RATE: 7.2
MOTION ESTIMATION: BEST

Please let me know where I am making mistake.

By: Enanovi

Enanovi — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:30:03 +0000

Use final cut… widescreen filter is in the generators folder i believe…

By: Allan

Allan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 07:55:01 +0000

Hey I was wondering if anyone knows how to get the black bars across the screen before i compress the footage so it looks 16/9 on a 4/3 monitor. Should i go into after effects and import the project from finalcut and make a black background at 720/576? then layer the project on top of the black background then cut the top and bottom off? is that the only way to do it? how do u do it? thr must be another way that wont require exporting and importing into other programs. thanks.

By: cht

cht — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 11:56:06 +0000

Keep up this great resource http://www.chtodelat.org/uploadfiles/f/

By: John

John — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 02:33:41 +0000

I would recommend always going with anamorphic (squashed).